Develop Effective Online Diversity Training
According to a recent study, companies with a more diverse workforce (across dimensions like gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation) tend to outperform less-diverse companies. As a human resource (HR) professional, you may recognize that recruiting, hiring, and retaining a diverse workforce spark innovation and improve business performance.
If your company wants to develop online diversity training that will help hiring managers to recruit, hire, and retain a broader array of candidates, you may be thinking, “Where do I begin?” Let’s dig into how you can develop effective training to support your company’s diversity goals.
Identify Areas That Need Improvement
Before you can improve your organization’s diversity efforts, you must identify areas that need improvement. Analyzing demographic information, such as the number of employees in a specified age range, tenure, gender, or ethnic group, is a good place to start. If you don’t have access to this information, try distributing a survey to employees. Or, consider asking a colleague in the HR department to review Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) data to identify where your organization needs to improve.
For instance, if three women and 10 men make up your organization’s director-level employees, you may need to improve gender hiring practices. But it’s important to analyze data in different ways to get more specific insights. Perhaps when you dig deeper, you discover that all three women in director positions have more than 10 years of experience. Meanwhile, eight of the 10 men have less than seven years of experience.
What might these findings suggest? That you may need to remove gender bias from your hiring and performance review processes. The data implies that women in your organization require more experience than their male counterparts to get hired for or promoted to similar roles.
Define Goals And Objectives
Once you identify specific areas for improvement, develop a mixture of short- and long-term goals backed by more measurable objectives. An example of a short-term goal may be to increase the number of women in hiring pools for director-level positions. A supporting objective could be posting job openings in the next 30 days on three job websites focused on women in leadership.
A long-term goal may be to ensure that as the company scales, it fills at least 40% of its future director-level positions with women who have five to eight years of experience. An objective could be to create online training that educates hiring managers on how they can better support underrepresented employees—in this case, women—throughout the hiring and promotion processes.
Gather Information And Organize Content
To develop this training for hiring managers, first, you’ll want to gather relevant content from Subject Matter Experts to support your training strategy. Your high-level diversity training outline could look something like this:
Lesson 1: Recruitment + Hiring
- Share best practices to follow in recruiting diverse candidates.
Lesson 2: Retention
- Use a retention matrix to identify top performers who may be at risk of leaving. Then, develop a personalized retention plan for each person.
- Develop targeted leadership programs and establish support mechanisms for underrepresented employees. Some examples: diversity executive leadership programs [1], inclusive leader programs [2], emerging leaders development programs [3], and employee and business resource groups [4].
- Provide information to managers on unconscious bias and how it plays in managing underrepresented employees.
Lesson 3: Culture
- Share information about cultural celebrations throughout the year and consider employees’ cultural and religious customs when planning major events or group meals. Consider Ramadan, for example.
- Share tools and other learning materials on diverse cultural experiences.
Lesson 4: Compliance
- Educate hiring managers on nondiscrimination policies and resources for filing complaints or resolving issues related to discrimination. Be sure to supply employees with the resources to hold hiring managers accountable.
Quiz
- Test managers on their new knowledge to make sure that they have the skills to improve diversity in your organization.
Now that you’ve sourced and organized the content you need, you’re one step closer to building your diversity training. The next step is to actually create a diversity training course.
Choose Your Online Training System And Create Your Course
Before you can create diversity training, you need to look at your options for building online training. With online training, your people can access your course from any location.
Online training is usually built with software known as an authoring app. These apps can vary in their features and capabilities, but almost all of them are stand-alone apps you install on a computer. While many of these apps are powerful and let you develop online training full of cool, interactive exercises, they also have a steeper learning curve. So, they can take a while to master.
Stand-alone authoring apps are only half of the online training equation. Once you’ve built your course with stand-alone software, you’ll still need a separate, stand-alone app known as a Learning Management System (LMS) to host your course online as well as monitor and assess your learners’ performance.
Thankfully, today, you have a simpler option than purchasing both a stand-alone app and an LMS: an all-inclusive training system. Rise is an all-in-one online training platform that’s super easy to use and has a minimal learning curve. Quickly and easily, you can create diversity training that’s enjoyable to take and simple to manage.
Rise makes creating engaging content a snap. For example, you can add interactive scenarios that immerse employees in realistic situations. Scenarios challenge learners to practice more complex skills like decision-making, identifying workplace behaviors, and honing interpersonal skills. Sorting activities challenge learners to make deliberate choices and get instant feedback about them. And ungraded knowledge checks let learners easily gauge their understanding of new concepts.
You can even start building your training from an extensive library of ready-made, beautifully interactive lessons on retaining diverse talent and quantifying and measuring diversity, inclusion, and belonging. And choose from lessons on unconscious bias topics like overcoming unconscious bias and avoiding unconscious bias while recruiting talent.
Training created in Rise is fully responsive. That means it works great on every device—laptops, tablets, and even smartphones. And because your content is online, everyone in your organization can access diversity training, anytime, wherever they are. And with the reports, you can see whether your team is mastering the skills necessary to build and maintain an inclusive organization. With an all-in-one training system, you can equip hiring managers with the skills they need to recruit, hire, and retain a broader array of diverse candidates. That’s a win-win.
References:
[1] Diversity Executive Leadership Program
[4] What's Next for Employee Resource Groups?
Originally published at blog.rise.com.
