How Can Diversity Training Increase Awareness Building or Skill Building?
Providing employees with the tools for successful job performance is essential. One such tool is diversity training, which means increasing employee awareness about the differences as well as the similarities among employees who comprise the employer’s workforce, and the employer’s client base or population served.
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The Basics of Diversity Training
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Generally speaking, the traditional focus of diversity training is race, gender, sexual orientation, national origin and other physical or relational factors that come to mind when describing diversity in the workplace. Diversity trainers often utilize buzz words like “inclusiveness,” “tolerance” and “acceptance” to help employees understand the differences among people in the workforce.
Improving Diversity Training
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Mandatory, one-dimensional diversity training is considered ineffective by researchers who study workplace trends, however. When employees are forced to participate in diversity training—for the sake of resolving or preventing discrimination complaints and lawsuits against the organization—they may be less inclined to embrace the traditional focus of diversity training.
Expanding the focus of diversity training to provide training that benefits the individual employee can significantly improve chances that the organization—overall—will benefit from diversity training. Consequently, the most effective diversity training involves a comprehensive approach to increasing employee awareness and improving job skills which are important to successful performance.
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Adding the “Increasing Awareness” Component to Diversity Training
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When human resources leaders use the phrase "increasing awareness," it means you're becoming well-informed about the current workforce, and how change affects the employee's job and the organization's goals. For example, increasing awareness in the health care industry means understanding the impact a nursing shortage might have on individual careers, patient trends, hiring forecasts and the stability of employer hospitals. These are factors that should play an important role in diversity training. Improving our knowledge of the underlying differences and similarities among people leads to greater insight concerning the impact of a nursing shortage. Greater insight about the nursing shortage also demonstrates increased awareness.
What to Expect from Adding a Skill-Building Component to Diversity Training
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Skill-building is another important component of effective diversity training, best achieved by using a two-pronged approach to employee training: knowledge and practice. Human resources leaders increase the value of diversity training through motivating employees to put into practice knowledge gained about the differences and similarities among people from diverse populations. Again, using the health care industry as an example, utilizing lessons learned about diverse populations translates to greater ability and skill in providing optimum health care to diverse populations, which in turn, enhances patient care and patient satisfaction.
Considerations
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Broaden the scope and effectiveness of your diversity training program by adding components such as "increasing awareness" and "skill-building." It's a shift from the traditional concept of diversity that could result in huge benefits for today's employers and employees.
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References
- “The Washington Post”: Most Diversity Training Ineffective, Study Finds; Shankar Vedantam; Jan. 20, 2008;
- "Identifying Goals and Outcome Measures for Diversity Training: A Multi-Dimensional Framework for Decision-Makers;" Lorraine Gutiérrez, Jean Kruzich, Teresa Jones, Nora Coronado; Administration in Social Work; 1544-4376; Volume 24; Issue 3; 2000; Pages 53–70
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