Most organizations now recognize the importance of a diverse workforce. In our massive, multicultural world, including a broader range of life experiences and minority groups (based on race, religion, gender, age, sexual orientation, ability, etc.) can not only help your business be more agile, but it’s also important to help you connect with your target audience and customers.
However, workplace diversity entails more than just hiring practices. If you haven’t spent time intentionally developing an inclusive culture, you may struggle to retain top talent.
Employees from minority groups seek workplace cultures that value diversity, make them feel at home, and support them. This is why many organisations use offline and online diversity and inclusion training to make their people learn about diversity and inclusion.
What exactly is inclusion and diversity training?
Training in diversity and inclusion is one method for promoting diversity. Subconscious biases, anti-racism, allyship, micro-inequities, sexual harassment, cultural sensitivity, and having pivotal conversations in an inclusive workplace are all covered in training.
Employees and hiring managers can be taught to be more conscious of their role in fostering a respectful work environment, as well as should be given approaches and tools to combat sexism, racism, and other workplace disparities.
Diversity training programs and eLearning courses can help with this.
Continue reading to know more about learning management systems and how corporations can promote inclusivity and diversity through training and the tool.
1. Train For Cultural Competency
Provide a cultural awareness online course via your LMS to help employees and managers learn how to understand better, interact with, and appreciate cultures other than their own. This form of employee learning is an amazing method for engaging learners while also fostering workplace inclusion.
Increase the number of employees included in the training modules.
Companies can train multiple teams at the same time using learning management systems. Asynchronous courses allow learners from various departments to learn together. Encouraging inclusivity and teaching the basics of it would be far more effective if the entire office went through the training at the same time.
When it concerns making education more accessible, LMS platforms break down many barriers.
2. Language Barriers
An LMS allows you to develop training and personalized learning pathways that better support marginalized groups, like employees who may encounter language barriers or those with a disability, such as hearing or visual impairment.
eLearning promotes inclusivity by embracing assistive technology tools such as audio descriptions.
Trainers can use an adaptive learning path to engage learners who are typically difficult to reach actively. Most learning management systems support a wide variety of languages and backgrounds, eliminating language barriers for your personnel.
3. Make An Information Library
There are plenty of questions that your employees would not feel comfortable asking their peers about social evils such as xenophobia, racism, and gender discrimination. At the same time, these questions must be addressed to promote true tolerance and inclusivity.
An LMS enables businesses to create a library of valuable and insightful information on such topics that have a positive influence on employees.
4. Ensure Equal Information Access
LMS platforms provide options for automatic tracking of knowledge progression and certifications, content testing to assess comprehension, scenario application, and notifications and emails to notify employees, administrators, and managers of training opportunities and needs. These features assist your organization in ensuring that no one, especially marginalized individuals, falls through the cracks.
5. Encourage Career Development
Many organizations now prioritize welcoming more minority individuals into leadership positions. Ensuring proper career paths is critical for putting employees on the right track and building your leadership funnel.
Career pathing is a process that organizes the development of an employee’s skills, knowledge, and experience needed to advance in their career.
In general, eLearning platforms help employees stay on track by providing 24/7 content availability, cross-device functionality, and course and status tracking.
Video-on-demand broadcasting may deliver the material and track user basics, but an LMS platform does a quicker and better job at tracking engagement with in-depth, customizable metrics to understand how an individual is progressing truly.
6. Implement Unconscious Bias Training
Employee training on DEI policies is insufficient to drive systemic change. Most people are unaware of their unconscious biases and behavioral patterns, and they are frequently blindsided by the culture with which they’re most familiar.
Blended, in-person, or Virtual Instructor-Led Training (VILT) and scenario-based eLearning with the help of an LMS can aid in the discovery of issues and the facilitation of discussions about bias topics through interactive tools (like forums and chat rooms) and community participation.
Consider bringing in minority employees to express their viewpoints and experiences with bias in the workplace. When employees see how their colleagues are affected, the problem becomes real and relevant rather than hypothetical.
7. Convert Education Into Practice
Educating your employees on the need for diversity is only one-half of the equation. The use of this knowledge in the business and one’s personal life make education valuable.
The crux of inclusion is collaboration. Employees will never understand the actual meaning of inclusion until they collaborate on a wide range of activities. Employees can now collaborate on learning projects in entirely new ways thanks to LMS systems.
While LMS platforms do not play a direct part in collaborative projects, they are essential during the planning phase. Employees gain experience working in a diverse environment with a variety of people by performing mock tasks and projects in Learning Management Systems. Nothing beats various people coming together to tackle a problem in terms of inclusivity.
Conclusion
Employees will feel voiceless and disrespected if inclusivity is not promoted in the workplace. Even if you have a diverse group of talented individuals on your team, inclusivity must be established. Employees can become change agents at both the personal and organizational levels when provided with the right content and technology.
LMS platforms are fundamentally designed to deliver, track, engage, and manage change in order to foster a culture of growth, success, and continuous learning.
Using your LMS to assist DEI objectives can help establish equal chances for growth across the firm, establish your organization as a dedicated DEI advocate, and help you fully harness the perks of an inclusive employee base.
