Diversity Awareness

Audience:

This class is ideal for managers and HR personnel.

Prerequisites:

None

Description:

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 half-day workshop will give you ways to celebrate diversity in the workplace while bringing individuals together.

Course Objectives:

This half-day workshop teaches participants to:

• Describe what diversity and its related terms mean
• Explain how changes in the world have affected you and your view
• Identify your stereotypes
• Use politically correct terms and avoid those which are not
• Apply the diversity awareness model
• Avoid the pitfalls related to diversity
• Use a technique for dealing with inappropriate behavior
• Develop a management style to encourage diversity
• Take action if you or one of your employees feels discriminated against

Outline:

Lesson 1: Course Overview

• You will spend the first part of the course 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.

Lesson 2: Defining Diversity

• Participants will begin by defining diversity and related terms, including affirmative action, bias, stereotype, and Equal Employment Opportunity.

Lesson 3: Identifying Stereotypes

• During this session, participants will explore stereotypes from different angles through a lecture and group exercise.

Lesson 4: Communicating Effectively With Different Cultures

• Communications can be tricky even within one’s own culture, not to mention across cultures. This session deals with communications under the lens of high and low context cultures while also tackling various forms of body language and other types of communication skills. The session wraps up with a look at handling miscommunication through a case study.

Lesson 5: The Diversity and Awareness Model

• In this session, participants will look at six areas of the diversity and awareness model.  A group discussion will take them through each area and give them ideas of how it can be applied in their workplace.

Lesson 6: The Multigenerational Workplace

• This session begins with an activity where the participants answer questions based on the way they view different ideas in the workplace. After the facilitator explains each generation and their modes of communication, then participants are given the results of their assessments to see where they fall. The moral is that being born during a certain generation does not always mean that is the way individuals think or communicate