Diversity Training For Employers: Everything You Need To Know

When we talk about diversity training for employers, we have to discuss the extra concern that employers should have while training for the same. In this era of working from home and multinational companies, it is imperative that we become more open to diversity and accept that people around us are different in nature. Diversity training aims to teach us tolerance and eventually acceptance of these differences and see that despite being different, we are the same on some levels.

If you are looking for modern diversity training that is used by companies such as Blackberry and Stanford University to help build empathy through narrative storytelling while using effective tactics to reduce social and psychological barriers to inclusion, equity, and diversity, contact Impactly today for a free demo.

Types of Diversity Training for Employers

Diversity refers to the difference of people in terms of gender identity, race, culture, ethnicity, age, sex, and everything else that people are discriminated against.

Usually, many companies and leaders believe that diversity programs help to

• Develop tolerance and understanding within employees
• Celebrates and creates acceptance for foreign culture, ethnicity, or genders other than the heteronormative ones. 
• Eliminate implicit bias to at least some point
• Makes the workers able to stand up to discrimination against themselves and others. 

There can be numerous types of diversity training. These are the same for employers and employees. 

• Awareness Training

This process of training is very popular and effective. Every leader or employer should know how to diversify their workplace. In awareness training, trainees learn about different people from different backgrounds and basic things about their culture and life experience. Employers should know the origin of their staff since they are the ones hiring them. Organizing Awareness training can help leaders in decision-making and problem-solving, keep the implicit bias in check and be as fair as possible while giving someone a promotion or hiring new staff.

• Skill-based Diversity Training

This type of training is more beneficial for the workers and the employers who work with their staff. This training basically focuses on having different people in a team and using their intellectual and material resources. This training helps in creating spontaneous communication within a diverse workforce, reinforces existing skills, and encourages building methods. This training also concerns itself with training for administrative purposes, which is beneficial for employers. 

• Diversity Audits

Diversity audits are routine checks in the workplace to see if there is any discrimination being carried on. This check-up is mainly done by HR professionals. But when it comes to HR professionals, the leaders must evaluate them. To do that, they have to evaluate themselves as well. Diversity audits help in ensuring the company values and that no discrimination happens at the administrative level.

• Intermediate Diversity Training

This is arguably the most tangible and effective training for employees and employers alike. This training guides you on how to work with or above people that are different from you. This training discussed personal behavior along with systemic issues. It is believed to help in identifying unconscious or implicit biases within the executive and leadership level and guides on how to mitigate them. 

• Basic Diversity Training

A basic training program is a good place to start diversity training. Although basic training does little to change company culture, it brings up issues and promotes diversity. So as a leader or employer, you shouldn't skip out on it. These basic training modules usually cover anti-racism training, anti-sexism training, educating about sexual orientation and gender identities, cultural sensitivity training, and human resource compliance training.

• Mobile Learning

In the era of a pandemic and lockdown, it is imperative that we learn to work with remote teams and still not forget to reinforce diversity. Mobile learning is cost-effective, accommodative, and efficient. This can be organized any time of the day, depending on everyone's schedule. Everyone has the same access to things and recordings of the training sessions. 

Why is Diversity Training for Employers Important?

The employers, administrators, and people in head executive positions have an added responsibility to hold the company's value and commit themselves to diversity training in order to set an example. This is why diversity training for employers have extra significance-- 

• Since they encourage and reinforce diversity, they have to be extra careful not to set discriminatory examples.
• In some cases, employers themselves have a heavy implicit bias that affects their hiring and promotion choices. That has to be eradicated if the workplace is to become diverse and safe. 
• Employers have to check their actions around staff since there are multiple quid pro quo harassment charges against supervisors and CEOs.
• When it comes to employers, along with intolerance and implicit bias, the question of the undeniable power hierarchy.
• If discrimination happens higher up in the company's chain, it is harder for employees to complain or stand up for themselves, so employers have to look out for them. 

Benefits of Diversity Training

The importance of diversity training is manifold. Diversity is tied to the growth and strength of the company or organization. Diversity training teaches employees how to accept differences in the workplace, develop a spirit of tolerance for other employees, respect their struggles and life experiences, and it helps in building a winning team despite cultural differences among employees. 

Some of the benefits of diversity training are discussed below.

• Sense of Belonging

It is the employer's duty to ensure that the workspace they provide the employees with can accept them and make them feel like they belong. Diversity training can do that. The results of diversity training in developing this sense of belonging are phenomenal. 

• Accepting Workplace 

Diversity training can, in truth, make the workplace more accepting and accommodating so that everyone's ideas and knowledge get a place to be expressed. Diversity is a quality that every employee looks for in their workplace and prefers a diverse workforce over a rigid and inflexible one.

• Increased Productivity

If the mental health of the employees and employers is in great shape, the productivity in the office space automatically increases. Also, the diverse workforce and creative minds can come up with great and profitable ideas. 

• Reduced Turnover and Increased Employee Satisfaction

As we said earlier, every employee prefers a diverse workforce over a rigid and inflexible one. So if the employers are able to maintain a diverse workplace, chances are the employees are not going to resign. This will reduce the turnover, which costs all the US companies substantial money every year. And it will also generate employee satisfaction which is great for the company's reputation.

• Avoiding PR Disasters

With diversity training, you can avoid PR disasters like in Starbucks. When a Starbucks employee called the cops on two black men waiting for their friend in the Philadelphia branch, Starbucks had to close all 8000 of its US branches to conduct diversity training. To ensure that doesn't happen to your company, it's important to conduct diversity training that gives results.

• Better Employee Engagement

If a workplace is accommodative and appreciates the ideas of an employee, the employee is bound to be more invested in the work process than they were before. This is an incredible feat that diversity training has achieved. 

• Larger Market Share

If your brand or organization is diverse in nature, it will be easier for you to reach out to a larger market and actually seem appealing to them. A diverse workforce will understand the diverse needs of its customers better. 

In a nutshell

Diversity training is as important for the employers as it is for the employees, if not more. Since the responsibility of maintaining a diverse workforce is for the employers and other employees will follow their examples to do the right thing, it is extremely important that we focus on diversity training for employers and not just employees or workers.