In the last decade, how businesses hire, retain, and train employees have undergone a remarkable transformation. The workforce isn’t just expanding but it is becoming more and more diverse with the entry of employees from different cultural backgrounds. This is an added advantage for businesses because such a diverse workforce contributes to the growth and development of the business through their skills, abilities, knowledge, and experience.
Today, many organizations have instituted Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive (DEI) online training programs to build a safe, supportive and inclusive workplace. But this is not sufficient. As an organization and business leader, you need to ensure that your online training resources as well as modules altogether are diverse, equitable, and inclusive without being specifically for DEI training purposes.
Table of Contents
What does Diverse, Equitable, And Inclusive (DEI) Mean?
All this while, businesses have been focusing extremely on establishing a diverse and inclusive workplace. But once employees become a part of your organization, what to do next? Directly jumping on training isn’t a viable solution. You have to ensure that the onboarding and training programs are diverse, equitable, and inclusive, too.
Diverse here means that the online training resources shouldn’t just be confined to wordy documents or PDFs, you need to add more diversity to them. For example include pictures, videos, audio, and other multimedia that caters to the need of employees.
Equitable here means that all the employees, whether new or old, should get an equal opportunity and access to the online training programs and resources without discrimination.
Inclusive here means that the eLearning resources and training programs address the needs of employees with different backgrounds, learning modalities, and abilities.
Thus, if you want to create a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workforce, then you need to make sure that everything that you provide to your employees is diverse, equitable, and inclusive as well.
Here are some tips that can help you create diverse, equitable, and inclusive online training programs.
1. Use Of Pictures
It has been estimated that in the next few years more than 75% of the workforce will be constituted of Millenials and most of them are going to be “non-white.”
Thus you should be a little careful while making use of pictures and videos in eLearning resources and onboarding. The choice of your pictures or videos should be such that they represent the rest of the world.
For instance, if you create an onboarding tutorial video for employees, then make sure that the pictures that don’t hurt the sentiments of a community. You can use animated characters that feature women and the LGTB community, other than men to ensure inclusivity.
You can use an LMS like Docebo to provide the best online training and eLearning content to the employees.
2. Use Of Language
If you wish to establish an all-inclusive workforce that preaches diversity, then you need to ensure that the online training resources you provide are available in different languages. For this, you can make use of a multilingual learning management system. It can help you in building localized eLearning content. This further can help you in strengthening the workforce.
3. Use Of Examples And Terminology
The examples and terminology that you use in eLearning content or onboarding programs should be inclusive. For example, saying that employees from X community from Y country possess more intellect and skills would deter others from putting their best efforts into the training. Hence, the examples and terminology should be culturally sensitive in every aspect.
4. Avoid Microaggression
A microaggression is a negative or harsh comment that targets a person or a community that makes them feel uncomfortable. Sometimes the one who passes such comments does it unintentionally and is unaware of hurting someone else.
Typical microaggressions used in the workplace are-
- Women always interrupt in between meetings (Microinsult).
- Employees who don’t know English would never become good salespeople (Typecast).
- Asians are good at maths while others are not (Stereotype).
You have to ensure that the eLearning content or your training programs don’t promote such microaggressions.
5. Equitable Distribution Of Resources
The eLearning content and online training modules should be made available to all the employees, whether old or new. If a new hire needs training for upskilling, then an old employee also needs the training to reskill himself.
Conclusion
As a business leader, you should be open to welcoming change and ready to adapt, learn, and grow with the changing scenarios. If providing diverse, equitable, and inclusive training is important, then creating diverse, equitable, and inclusive online training programs is equally important.
