DEI training enables employees to develop skills and strategies to promote more equitable and inclusive workplaces, often including understanding and resolving conflicts that result from differing perspectives or cultures.
People feel more bonded to companies that recognize and honor their identities and cultures; especially Millennials and Gen Z tend to prioritize working with socially conscious companies.
Increased Productivity
Diverse workforces not only improve employee morale, but can also make your company more competitive within your industry. According to research conducted by McKinsey & Company, companies that prioritize diversity tend to be more profitable than those who don’t invest in DEI training programs – providing further evidence in favor of diversifying your staff for financial gains.
DEI training can also help your employees gain a greater appreciation and empathy for marginalized groups in the workplace, which creates an inclusive work culture that provides space for all employees to express themselves freely while sharing unique viewpoints.
DEI training can also strengthen teamwork by helping your employees form better working relationships among individuals with diverse backgrounds, experiences and viewpoints. A balanced team with diverse strengths and personalities has the potential to generate more ideas, solve problems more creatively and achieve greater productivity than one consisting of identical members.
Investment in diversity equity and inclusion training can assist your organization in creating more robust policies to foster inclusivity, prevent discrimination and provide equal opportunities to employees. Setting clear, consistent policies helps your company remain compliant with local and federal laws and regulations as well as prevent government investigations or lawsuits against your company.
Small businesses have access to several online learning platforms that provide free or low-cost DEI courses, with Coursera being one of the more well-known platforms with thousands of free DEI courses on a range of subjects. Other platforms like Udemy and eCornell both offering management and leadership programs including Optimizing Diversity in the Workplace.
Due to the sensitive nature of DEI training, it’s crucial that employees can interact with materials in a safe and respectful environment. Collaboration platforms such as 360Learning make it simple for employees to participate in DEI programs while giving valuable feedback about content presented.
Young employees today, particularly millennials and Gen Z employees, tend to be highly socially aware. As such, they prefer working for companies that take diversity, equity and inclusion seriously; by investing in DEI training and building an inclusive company culture that fosters equality you can attract and retain top talent.
Employee Engagement
Companies that make diversity equity and inclusion (DEI) a top priority often see an increase in employee engagement, due to staff feeling valued and accepted within the workplace. DEI training allows staff members to bring all aspects of themselves to work, which in turn can foster increased productivity and team collaboration among teams.
When creating a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training program, it is essential to keep in mind the sensitive nature of some employees and the difficulty associated with its topic. Thus, tailoring each company’s DEI training session specifically to their needs. If your company has an extremely diverse workforce, training should focus on exploring each group’s perspectives and experiences while for more homogenous workforces it may be more advantageous to address the effects of unconscious bias in the workplace culture.
Effective training not only addresses the sensitivity of DEI topics, but it also offers employees actionable strategies they can implement into their day-to-day roles. Furthermore, effective DEI training builds allyship by teaching employees about advocating for marginalized colleagues.
Establishing an effective DEI training program takes both time and commitment; but its payoff can be considerable. Implementing inclusive best practices into company culture will allow you to attract top talent, increase productivity, and ultimately boost business results.
Companies should start by assessing employee engagement gaps and measuring existing levels. This can be accomplished via surveys that ask about likes and dislikes, family status, life experiences, religion and opinions among others. Furthermore, it should be explained why such information is being collected and how it will benefit employees in the long run.
Senior leaders play an essential role in modeling inclusivity and supporting their employees’ efforts. Many organizations sponsor employee resource groups (ERGs) to allow employees to voice concerns about working at the company. Furthermore, employers can utilize eNPS scores or job satisfaction rates as measures of employee satisfaction with regards to DEI policies within their organization.
Reduced Risk of Disruption
Today’s hyper-connected world makes it all too easy for one ill-timed post or email to ruin a company’s reputation. Diversity equity and inclusion training can teach employees how to interact more appropriately with coworkers, which will result in an easier work environment.
Studies on diversity and inclusion demonstrate that companies who take measures to be more diverse outperform those that do not, due to employees feeling included and happier at work, which results in greater employee retention rates and an ultimately stronger workforce.
Profitability in business is directly proportional to an organization’s efforts at inclusion. A McKinsey study showed that companies that excel at ethnic and cultural diversity are 36% more profitable than those in the fourth quartile; similarly, well-managed diverse teams can outshone homogenous ones; therefore it’s critical for leaders to provide structures which acknowledge this diversity and celebrate it.
Diversity training is a critical part of workplace diversity efforts, helping employees identify unconscious biases and minimize negative microaggressions that damage workplace relationships and productivity. In our course designed for CEMEX learners were instructed on how to become more inclusive while using language that respected all backgrounds.
As a result, this training can improve collaboration, communication and teamwork; furthermore it may lead to more innovative problem-solving through diverse viewpoints being brought forward and creating a more rounded and holistic approach.
Leaders play an especially essential role in diversity training, as they tend to hold the highest positions within an organization. Their involvement will create a more welcoming culture while decreasing disruption risks. Furthermore, it will reduce two major risks that come with missteps regarding diversity – reputational fallout and legal liability risks – which both pose costly dangers.
Increased Profitability
Diversity equity and inclusion training not only aids employees from diverse backgrounds to succeed in the workplace, but it can also boost profitability for companies. Employees increasingly gravitate toward organizations that prioritize equality both because it makes them feel good about their jobs as well as due to any resulting social good it may bring – this trend particularly resonates with younger Millennials who value companies with positive global impacts.
Diverse teams tend to produce smarter and more innovative solutions than teams without diversity. By training managers to embrace a diverse workforce and embrace diversity-related equity issues (DEI), companies can foster an environment conducive to innovation and growth in teams. By conducting DEI training and increasing awareness around biases, managers can help remove any obstacles which prevent employees from reaching their full potential.
Diversity training helps employees recognize unconscious biases, which are stereotypes about other people that form without a person being conscious of it. Furthermore, diversity training helps employees recognize microaggressions – negative actions committed against someone due to perceived differences.
Implementing an inclusive company culture will attract more applicants and improve the quality of employees you hire. More than 77% of job seekers assess a company’s culture when considering employment options; recruiting from diverse pools increases your odds of finding someone suitable to fill roles within your organization.
Employees who feel they belong in their jobs tend to be happier and more engaged in them, leading them to greater productivity – and in turn increasing profitability. A McKinsey study discovered that top-quartile companies with ethnic and cultural diversity are 36% more profitable than their fourth quartile counterparts.
Diverse teams produce more by creating an environment in which all ideas and contributions can be heard freely and safely, and by providing customers with services tailored to each group individually.
Deloitte research indicates that diversity can pay dividends: diverse companies have significantly higher profit margins and stock performance than their homogenous counterparts, so now more than ever diversity should not just be considered an abstract goal but integrated into business operations directly.