Diversity and cultural awareness is vital to every company across Australia. Diversity training ensures that all employees are treated fairly, and cultural awareness training helps create a company where every culture is considered and celebrated. This can improve company culture, making your organisation a positive work environment and helping to boost productivity and employee satisfaction.
Knowing the best way to train employees on cultural awareness and diversity can be tricky, though, especially if this is training you have never offered. Our guide today will show you how to train your employees to help you create an inclusive environment that is respectful to the diverse cultural backgrounds across Australia and the world.
What Is Diversity And Cultural Awareness Training?
Diversity and cultural awareness training can be viewed together or as separate entities. Diversity training is designed to boost your employees' awareness about the different diversity issues in their workplace. It can help them challenge their beliefs on diversity and provide them with the skills they need to interact and collaborate with others who have different backgrounds.
Cultural awareness training is similar but is designed to teach employees about cultural differences. By learning about these differences, your employees can work better as a team and be aware of cultural differences that might impact other employees.
Diversity and cultural awareness are often combined in training courses to provide cultural competence and ensure that all employees of diverse backgrounds and different cultures are respected at work.
How To Train Employees On Diversity And Cultural Awareness
You can train employees on diversity and cultural awareness in several ways, including external courses, reinforcing values, and celebrating diversity. We have outlined these methods below to see how diversity and cultural awareness training could work in your company.
Use External Courses
An external training program can be the best way to offer diversity and cultural awareness training. These will be an added cost to your business, but they are led by experts who can deliver successful diversity training that makes each employee aware of cultural differences that could impact them.
These courses can be delivered in person or available online, allowing you to spread training time across your week or month to ensure your business usually continues. External courses are an excellent way to introduce diversity training and cultural awareness if you have not had them at your company before. They also allow you to learn at a management level.
You can find plenty of external courses online at a range of prices, allowing you to find one that best suits your company's budget.
Create A Pressure Plan
A pressure plan is the perfect way to kick-start your diversity and cultural awareness training. Pressure plans also involve a collective conversation, where employees are trained to think through situations from all perspectives and anticipate the consequences of their decisions.
These pressure plans are fantastic ways for your employees to experience real-life diversity training and see how their knowledge will be put into practice. It is an excellent method for employees with client-facing roles who must engage with people of diverse backgrounds and cultures daily. Pressure plans can be used in collaboration with training courses and repeated throughout the year. These are also excellent training tools when interviewing or onboarding new staff members, as you can see how they will react to diverse groups and whether they will require additional cultural sensitivity training.
Start At The Leadership Level
All training should start at the top and trickle down, helping to create an inclusive workplace. You should roll out your diversity training program at the leadership level first, as these will be the employees who will help create an inclusive environment. Offering diversity and cultural awareness training to your leadership team ensures there are trained managers who can spot any workplace conflicts and unsavoury language quickly and resolve the issues before the workplace becomes hostile. It is also a good idea to start with human resource management, ensuring no biased employees could discriminate against staff from different backgrounds.
Encourage Constant Dialogue
Diversity and cultural awareness training is more than one external course you hold annually. You should encourage dialogue all year round, and your employees should be encouraged to challenge discrimination and negative language used by those of different backgrounds and cultures.
Having a constant dialogue allows you to assess whether the lessons of the training have been learnt and whether additional resources are required. Constant dialogue also means that new employees are entering a company aware of diversity and constantly discussing how to be more culturally aware.
Reinforce Values Daily
Alongside your training courses, your company should embody these values daily. Diversity and cultural awareness should be at the heart of your policies and the day-to-day running of the business, ensuring that everyone feels welcome or safe.
Some changes are easy to adopt, while others require long-term work. By reinforcing these values daily, you are showing your employees how a diverse and culturally aware company operates, ensuring their training is put into practice daily.
You might find it beneficial to update your company values and have them displayed around your workplace so everyone is aware of them. This can also help to keep the conversation going, as employees will be physically reminded about their diversity training.
Build A Culture Of Inclusion
Building a culture of inclusion goes deeper than training courses and updating policies. This can take months or years to build, depending on the size of your company. A culture of inclusion means that when someone walks through your doors, they see a diverse company. This can take time, but a diverse company reflects a hiring board that is putting its diversity training into practice.
Implement Consistent Learning
We have touched on this before, but one course will not be enough for effective diversity and cultural awareness training. Consistent learning is essential to ensure that your diverse workforce is aware of different backgrounds and cultures and how to treat them. Alongside training courses, you can offer focus groups or in-person workshops to put the knowledge your employees have gained into practice.
Human resources can run these workshops and ad groups, or you can look to bring in external trainers who will help deliver sessions across your company. A mixture of in-house and external training ensures that you cover every basis of your employee training and create diverse teams that constantly improve their cultural awareness.
Celebrate Diversity
Alongside training, the celebration of diversity and cultural differences is important. Companies that regularly celebrate team members demonstrating appropriate behaviours show their employees that they value cultural competency and an understanding of diverse backgrounds. Celebrating these employees shows no room for negative behaviours or attitudes, reinforcing your diversity training.
Companies that celebrate their employees of other backgrounds and their religious holidays reinforce the importance of cultural awareness. For example, companies that hold Christmas parties but also celebrate Eid and other holidays honour their diverse team and ensure that every culture is respected.
Final Thoughts
Diversity and cultural awareness training programs are vital to any training you offer your employees. Whether you use external courses, in-house training, or update your policies to reflect your diverse company, you can expect your employees' understanding and behaviour to shift as your company becomes more culturally aware. When offering diversity and cultural awareness training, it's important to remember that this isn't a one-and-done event. You will need to continue with your ing, assessing your inclusive company culture and even deploying key performance indicators to see if your cultural awareness and diversity training programs foster a welcoming and supportive community among your employees.
Frequently Asked Questions
How Often Should Diversity And Cultural Awareness Training Be Provided?
Your regular company training program should include diversity and cultural awareness training. This includes providing training for employees as part of their onboarding process. You can revisit the training as often as you feel is needed. Some offer yearly diversity and cultural awareness training, where employees will revisit previous training, take part in an externally provided training course, or use the company's digital learning platform.
In an ever-changing society, it is important that diversity and cultural awareness training is provided regularly to ensure that all employees are culturally aware and considerate of the diverse employees in your company.
How Do You Promote Cultural Awareness In The Workplace?
You can promote cultural awareness in your workplace in several ways, including employee resources and additional training. We have listed some of the best ways you can promote cultural awareness and diversity in your company:
Offer employee resource groups
Provide implicit bias training
Implement inclusive recruitment practices
Call out and avoid all problematic language
Offer flexible holiday leave for different religious holidays
Encourage different communication styles
Develop inclusive policies
When promoting cultural awareness in your workplace, you can also consult with employees to see what they want. Employee opinions can be vital here to create content and training materials that are not offensive and free from discriminatory language or stereotypes.
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