These days, most organizations recognize the value of a diverse workforce. Including a wider range of life experiences and minority groups (religion, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, ability, etc.) not only can help your organization be more agile, it’s also critical for helping you connect with your audience and customers in our vast, multicultural world.
Workplace diversity is more than simply hiring practices, though. If you haven’t spent time developing a deliberately inclusive culture, you may have a hard time retaining great talent. Employees from minority groups are looking for company cultures that promote diversity, support them, and make them feel welcome.
That’s where diversity training programs and elearning courses come in.
Diverse workforce: What is diversity and inclusion training?
Diversity and inclusion training is a way to promote diversity. The training addresses things like implicit bias, allyship, anti-racism, micro-inequities, cultural sensitivity, sexual harassment, and having critical conversations in an inclusive workplace.
The training can teach employees and hiring managers to be more aware of their own role in creating a respectful work environment, and give them practical tools to confront racism, sexism, and other inequities in the workplace.
Diversity training program: Fostering workplace diversity and inclusion with an LMS
There are many ways to offer diversity training in the workplace. Using elearning software such as a learning management system is an important part of inclusion efforts, both to train employees to create a more inclusive work environment, and as a way to support employees from minority groups.
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Train for cultural competency: Offer a cultural competency online course through your LMS to help managers and employees to learn to better understand, appreciate, and interact with cultures outside their own. This employee education is an excellent way to engage learners and foster workplace inclusion.
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Language barriers and making learning more accessible: With an LMS, you can create training, and personalized learning paths that better support underrepresented groups, such as employees who may face language barriers or who have a disability such as dexterity limitations, being hearing impaired or visually impaired. Elearning fosters inclusivity by incorporating assistive technologies such as audio descriptions, as well. Adaptive learning path offers trainers flexibility to engage learners that is usually hard to reach. Most learning management systems support a diverse range of languages that support different backgrounds, removing language barriers for your employees.
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Offer places for critical conversations: Use the discussion forums in your learning management system as a place to facilitate conversations about workplace inclusion, and to create a space where your diverse workforce can connect with, support, and learn from each other and share different perspectives.
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Give all employees access to the same training initiatives and opportunities: Delivering online training through an LMS makes access to career opportunities more equitable for minority groups and a more more inclusive culture, helping to remove any unconscious bias. It’s more cost-effective to deliver online learning than it is to bring employees into the classroom, and due to the self-paced nature employees can fit training more easily into their schedules.
Resources for diversity training
Worried that you don’t have the resources or expertise to employ strategies and develop an online learning program in house? The good news is that there are a number of excellent diversity and inclusion online training courses that you can use.
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Diversity, equity, and inclusion resources for HR managers from MIT
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8 Best Diversity Training Programs (The Balance)
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Diversity and inclusion courses on LinkedIn Learning
Are you looking for a learning management system to support your diversity and inclusion training initiatives? Stay ahead, Take a tour of Opigno LMS to see how it can support your inclusion efforts and improve your overall learning experience or book a live demo with our experts.
Author: Adam Kennedy-Ripon
Design: Simon Contreras