Online Diversity Training: 6 Topics That Needs To Be Covered

Online diversity training is a virtual initiative taken by organizations to increase awareness among employees. It helps them gain the essence of working together with people belonging to different backgrounds, cultures, and beliefs. This is a suitable approach to facilitate cohesiveness and positive interaction, simultaneously reducing prejudice and discrimination.

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.

Benefits of Online Diversity Training 

• Low Costs

Diversity training held online can save financial budgets to a large extent when compared to trainings that are held at the workplace in offline mode. This can help save budgets spent on travel, rental accommodations, productivity, and other facilities.

• High Productivity 

Training conducted at workplaces requires employees to spend more of their time, such as half a day or even a full day. However, online training can reduce such tedious sessions into much shorter segments and help enhance productivity.

• Developing Skill Sets

Online diversity training can have a tremendous impact on improving skill sets for employees in a team such as non-ambiguous communications, problem-solving, and conflict management to work with more vigor in a diversified team.

• Bias Honesty

Online training sessions can be conducted in an anonymous manner to guarantee a high level of comfort for employees to speak out more and deal with difficult issues. The employees tend to be more honest when online and speak without holding back on certain stereotypical topics rather than when surrounded by a roomful of fellow colleagues and co-workers.

• Flexibility

Employees can fix their training sessions to their comfort such that they do not hinder their work process. Training can be carried out at any time of the day or night and they can return and refresh whenever needed.

Fostering Diversity

• Objective Criteria

Initializing objective criteria can significantly reduce the chances for bias or prejudice. Open discussions as a team can help managers and teams to build collaborative actions and plans together.

• Rewarding Employees

Diversity can be promoted by appreciating employees and encouraging the workforce to celebrate their peers’ strengths and uniqueness. An engaging recognition program held publicly can prove to be very impactful as they offer company-wide visibility and a sense of belonging. 

• Leverage Tools 

HR tools like software and platforms can help managers understand blind spots in all departments at all levels and immediately identify any teams or individuals that might feel underappreciated, thus monitoring progress towards becoming a more inclusive and diversified company.

• Psychological Safety

Safety and security are imperative for a workplace that needs to be ensured on all terms. Companies and organizations have to establish a culture where people can feel empowered to flag situations that are alarming, or speak up if feeling uncomfortable.

Importance of Online Diversity Training

• Online diversity training programs are implemented for an effective and interactive session to promote employee awareness. They help to improve workplace culture, motivate inclusive behaviors and increase engagement among employees.
• These training sessions help to provide flexible learning and act as a communication tool for explaining and reinforcing an organization's goals regarding diversity and inclusion.
• Online programs facilitate regular updates to reflect changes as per the happenings inside and outside the current world.
• Such training ensures to uphold the workplace sensitivity by helping employees to understand different perspectives of their colleagues and thus establish a strong action against discrimination and harassment.
• Online diversity training provides a solution by ensuring a supportive workplace that can encourage everyone to contribute to business growth

Topics Covered Under Online Diversity Training

• Unconscious Bias

Addressing unconscious bias is one of the key features of conducting an online diversity training program. The major hard step to take towards addressing unconscious bias is initially acknowledging that it exists. Online sessions can break down such sensitive and highly conceptual topics into shorter segments that are more easily understandable, non-accusatory, and unifying rather than divisive.

Such sessions can provide employees with the knowledge and tools to identify and mitigate their biases by themselves. This can result in an overall value for the individuals, teams as well as the company. 

• Gender Equality

Gender equality is a very common term that everyone has heard of and come across in their daily lives. Several companies and organizations are involved in online training sessions to create awareness among employees with a mix of genders and sexual orientations in a setting. These sessions are conducted to indicate that there is no discrimination among the applicants and employees in a working environment. 

However, this issue is still not addressed in various parts of the world due to the prevailing cultural attitudes against certain sections of society. This makes it difficult and impossible for a corporate to embrace gender equality since they risk the wrath of the dominant gender and societal groups. 

Thus, a mindset change is required for promoting such policies and this can only be done by training sessions that can raise awareness to ensure that the workforce is susceptible to the needs of women and differently oriented people. 

• Diversity and Inclusion

Online training sessions are recommended for familiarizing with the diverse concepts and their relevance in the workplace. These programs help to learn the importance of diversity for firms and their historical developments. They introduce the employees to key diversity-related concepts and issues. The modules include the impact of cognitive processes such as social categorization and how people react to such social environments.

• Inclusive Leadership Training 

Effective communication is one major feature for diversity and inclusion training that helps to inspire others, promote novel ideas and build a great leader. There is often some struggle while trying to communicate effectively, particularly with people from different backgrounds and cultures. These online sessions can help instill the inclusive leadership mindset of empowerment, accountability, courage, and humility into employees.

Various strategies for enhancing communication skills, understanding dialogue processes, debunking everyday communication myths, testing assumptions, listening, expressing views authentically, and communicating across differences are covered in these training programs.

• Minority Inclusion

This topic is focused on creating communities and acts as a great resource for understanding different kinds of diversity that range from education levels to mental and physical abilities. This online training session is especially for people who may fall into the minority division at a particular company. 

Using community health as a springboard for understanding the development of communities, one will be able to identify diversity and learn how to include young people who are overlooked or marginalized in the decision-making process. Moreover, these online programs can help workers learn about the different challenges of including youth in a community development scheme and get involved in changing demographics and barriers to equitable access.

• Optimizing Diversity

While dealing with social science perspectives, online diversity training programs enable employees to learn about diversity and how to utilize it for maximizing team performance, innovation, and creativity. Employees can also learn how to draw out the collective wisdom of diverse teams, handle conflict and establish common ground rules through real-world cases and peer-to-peer discussions.

Bottom Line

Diversity training needs to be initiated and organized all across the country. Employers and employees need to be aware of workplace diversity, hiring and promoting practices, and building an inclusive team. Online training sessions can prove to be cost-effective, impactful, and flexible for employees who are being onboarded or trained at different times.