How to Create Effective Employee Diversity Training

ThingLink Team April 18, 2023

In this blog post, we’ll look at why it’s important to develop successful diversity training initiatives that will help create a safe and supportive work environment. It will be particularly helpful for employers who may not have a human resources department or manager, or the resources to outsource expensive diversity training. You’ll see how you can easily create realistic and engaging training content that accurately reflects your own work environment.

The benefits of diversity training for organisations

Organisations of all sizes should aspire to creating an equitable and inclusive workplace, where all team members can thrive regardless of different backgrounds, socio-economic status, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity or religion.

Effective diversity training programs help to ensure that all staff feel respected and accepted by their co-workers while promoting an inclusive culture and inclusive behaviors. The bottom line for you as an employer is that creating an inclusive environment like this, where employees feel valued and respected, will assist both with attracting strong candidates from a wide range of backgrounds, and with staff retention.

What does diversity training cover?

Diversity, equity and inclusion training programs (or DEI for short) can cover an enormous range of issues and subjects. These may include such areas as cultural diversity, unconscious bias (eg racial bias) and sensitivity training.

Identifying your own specific workplace diversity training needs will help create more relevant and meaningful learning outcomes

Establishing clear and relevant learning objectives and anticipated outcomes is essential for the success of any employee training course, and a diversity program is no different.

Individual companies must decide the particular types of diversity training courses they require, to ensure that the training is realistic, useful and relevant to their own setting or environment. It may be that the location or nature of your organisation means that certain workplace diversity issues are more commonplace or problematic than others.

Key learning: Creating realistic scenarios based on real-life environments and specific situations will mean that the training you provide will be instantly more relatable, understandable and more easily applicable for all employees.

The benefits of using ThingLink’s Scenario Builder for employee training

Scenario Builder is the simplest way to create realistic and authentic virtual learning environments that perfectly mimic your company culture and the environments where your employee learners might find themselves during their working day. This has a number of benefits:

• It allows them to practice decision-making and problem-solving skills in a safe and low-risk environment.
• It allows them to explore the potential consequences of their decisions via branching scenarios that take them along a different path depending on the choices they make.
• Scenario Builder is a particularly useful tool for diversity training as it allows the learner to experience a situation or environment from a range of perspectives which are different from their own. This can give them an insight into how their own behaviour can be perceived from a different viewpoint.

Scenario Builder allows you to:

• Create questions which will prompt reflection and promote understanding among learners.
• Easily create realistic virtual environments at low cost with images, 360 images, videos or 360 videos captured in your own work spaces.
• Assess employee knowledge within the employee training scenario.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of your DEI training materials; using built-in metrics to assess and perfect your diversity and inclusion training.

Video: How to create a scenario for employee training

Further information

The three blogs below are a really helpful introduction to Scenario Based Learning and should provide further inspiration for creating your own course.

Scenario Based Learning for Corporate Training

How to Create Scenario Based Learning Experiences

5 Great Examples of Scenario-Based Learning