Diversity Training Examples: 4 Types You Should Know

Diversity training is becoming an essential topic for businesses across the board. As the discourse about diversity training expands, it's critical for all organizations to examine their own programs to see where they can improve, become more effective, and, most importantly, understand what works and what doesn't.

Many businesses have found success in implementing diversity training to improve their working cultures. Businesses can learn how to better administer their own training programs by looking at these successful diversity training in the workplace examples.

Examples of Diversity Training

Here are a few examples of good diversity training programs. Typical training comprises the following:

• The Essentials of Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion training course is designed to assist learners better understand their roles in promoting equality, combating all types of prejudice, and creating positive interactions among diverse groups of individuals in the workplace.

• The unconscious bias training takes a nonjudgmental approach to learning how unconscious prejudice works in the workplace.

• Courses to train, diversity trainers provide the skills, information, and experience needed to advise, develop, and support colleagues and organizations in DEI. 

• Race, Faith, and Cultural Diversity Training Courses that deal with managing diversity in the workplace are appropriate for anyone who has to deliver training, help people one-on-one, small group development/talks, or big group development/talks. Its goal is to help employees and managers plan ahead of time to fulfill the requirements of BIPOC, indigenous, Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic people (BAME)

• Equality, equity, and diversity are all words that come to mind while thinking about equality, equity, Encourage students to take classes on how to enhance diversity and inclusion awareness and encourage individuals or employees to speak up about DEI issues. Also included is DEI crisis management training.

Some Real-Life Instances of Diversity Training

1. NetSuite 

NetSuite, an enterprise software business, recently introduced a new mentoring project aimed at increasing the diversity of its employees. The initiative pairs high-performing female employees with mentors (of any gender) who work two levels above them and in other departments. Participants not only receive one-on-one career mentoring within the organization, but they also have the opportunity to share their expertise and experiences with their mentors, assisting more senior employees in staying current in the rapidly evolving technological environment.

This mentoring project promotes gender diversity in management while also enhancing the ability to exist high-level employees. According to the company, demand for participation in this project is "increasing quickly," indicating that the initiative is gaining traction among employees.

This benefit of mentoring corresponds to findings from a prior Harvard Business Review study, which said that “Mentoring is another way to engage managers and chip away at their biases, mentors help give their charges the breaks they need to develop and advance. The mentors then come to believe that their protégés merit these opportunities.”

Promoting a voluntary mentorship program might be a fantastic way to increase diversity and worker skills, according to this diversity training course.

2. Google

Google is one of the most successful firms in the United States when it comes to luring younger, more diverse candidates. As noted in an HBR article about attracting the best college talent, HBR “polled 15,000 Millennials – 60 percent still in college and 40 percent recent graduates.” According to the survey, 40.28 percent of respondents said they wanted to work for Google when asked to fill in the blanks for the top three organizations they wanted to work for.

When it comes to hiring young and diverse personnel from the new generation, the Internet search engine behemoth has the pick of the litter. To attain their diversity and inclusion percentages, Google performs a variety of things, including establishing special outreach programs to colleges, maintaining a strong social media presence, mentoring interns, and creating diversity-focused hiring channels that make it easy for job seekers to apply. In essence, Google has made diversity training a way of life for the company's employment process, which will help to assure greater diversity and inclusion in the future.

3. The US Army

The Army's policy of "don't ask, don't tell" when it came to the employment of LGBTQ soldiers for many years may have tainted the organization's approach to diversity. However, there is one successful example of "diversity training" in the organization's history, which dates back to World War II and was featured on the HBR diversity page.

The Army was still a segregated organization at the start of America's engagement in WWII. Only white soldiers were used in combat duties, and units were either entirely made up of one racial group or the other.

As the war proceeded and deaths increased, General Dwight D. Eisenhower found himself short-staffed, and “he requested black volunteers for combat duty.” As a result, black soldiers began to be assigned to the same companies as white soldiers, allowing the two groups to interact on an equal footing. A survey of the troops' racial opinions was conducted by Harvard sociologist Samuel Stouffer, who was on leave from the War Department.

The success of this somewhat dramatic kind of "diversity training" by complete immersion in an extreme circumstance(combat) was due to the groups' shared interests and goals, rather than their close proximity.

These are just a few instances of training programs and other initiatives that have aided in the promotion of diversity in various industries. They emphasize the fact that a truly effective diversity program does not start and stop with training. Other activities within the organization, such as mentorship, making concerted efforts to expand the diversity of new recruits and having diverse groups work together toward common goals, all help to improve workplace diversity training.

Types of Diversity Training that are Effective

• Awareness Training

As a result of a recent trend, every company professional must have a firm grasp on how to manage a diverse staff. Having diversity awareness training in the workplace can help with work challenges and inconsistencies in-group cohesion, as well as collective decision-making to reach goals and objectives. 

Awareness training is typically intended to raise people who are visible, valued, and respected in the workplace. Employees will be more conscious of others as a result of the Diversity Driving Force, which will improve problem-solving and innovation skills.

• Skill-Based Training

Every company guarantees that new hires are equipped with the necessary abilities to effectively manage and deal with the workforce. This training focuses on particular actions including developing new diversity-interaction skills, reinforcing existing abilities, and inventorying skill-building techniques for generating effective diverse workforces. Managers and supervisors are also given technical skill training in order to improve their technical and administrative abilities.

• Diversity Audits

Diversity audits are a difficult assignment for HR since they are formal assessments that examine the existing situation. They are primarily concerned with controlling employee management attitudes and their periodic examination of policies and processes. As a result, diversity audits are essential for managing employee thought processes within the firm.

• Mentoring for Diversity

In today's global environment, many businesses strive to maintain a collaborative competitive advantage. Many organizations mentor minority groups and deploy a wide range of information, skills, and motivation to exceptional individuals from various cultural origins, sexes, or races/ethnicities to achieve organizational goals. Many businesses have a diverse workforce with employees that bring a variety of viewpoints and abilities to the table. 

A key problem that organizations encounter when implementing diversity training for employees is getting them to collaborate and work together to achieve a similar goal.

For more information on diversity training and its examples, contact Impactly.