More than ever, a workplace is a diverse collection of individuals proud of who they are: their gender, their sexual orientation, their religion, their ethnic background, and all the other components that make an individual unique. One of the challenges for workplace leaders is how to help these diverse individuals work as a team.
We all know what happens to organizations that don’t have effective teamwork: they fail. And, failing to embrace diversity can also have serious legal costs for corporations. This one-day workshop will give you ways to celebrate diversity in the workplace while bringing individuals together.
You will spend the first part of the day getting to know participants and discussing what will take place during the workshop. Students will also have an opportunity to identify their personal learning objectives.
Participants will begin by defining diversity and related terms, including affirmative action, bias, stereotype, and Equal Employment Opportunity.
This session will help participants identify how a changing world has affected them. Participants will also score their pre-assignment (a self-awareness inventory) to identify possible areas for improvement.
During this session, participants will explore stereotypes from different angles through a lecture and two group exercises.
In this era of political correctness, it’s sometimes hard to keep up with words that have become inappropriate. We will take a look at some phrases that are considered universally incorrect and some basic guidelines. We’ll also take a humorous look at some phrases that have gone too far.
Diversity experts Armida Russell, Amy Tolbert, and Frank Wilderman have identified four cornerstones of diversity development: knowledge, acceptance, understanding, and behavior. We will examine each cornerstone in detail during this session.
There are some practices that discourage diversity more than they encourage it. We will look at four common mistakes and how to avoid them.
Diversity expert Lenora Billings-Harris has developed a four-step technique that you can use when someone is behaving in an inappropriate manner. It’s called STOP. Participants will learn about the technique through a lecture and will then practice it in a role play.
During this brief lecture, we will look at some simple things managers and employees can do to encourage diversity in their workplace.
To wrap up the day, we will discuss how to deal with discrimination as a manager and an employee.
At the end of the course, students will have an opportunity to ask questions and fill out an action plan.
