Communication and Diversity Adoption

Overview/Description
 Companies can recruit and hire employees to create a diverse work force. Managers can build teams with diversity in mind. However, organizations can't thrive on diversity if employees don't know how to communicate with one another. This course, Communication and Diversity Adoption, emphasizes the influence communication styles, methods, and strategies have on successfully implementing and maintaining diversity programs. These successful programs depend on how company employees react to adopting them, and the adoption process begins with how the change to a diverse work force is communicated to key employee segments within a company. You'll discover how the biases of different employee segments can be used to assist the buy-in to your diversity programs. You'll also find out what types of communication challenges you might expect. Key variables for communication based on the five employee segments are addressed. Ultimately, you'll find out how to use both the formal and informal communication networks within your organization to promote and maintain a successful, diverse work force.

Target Audience
 Employees at any level who desire an understanding of diversity and how to positively implement and maintain valuing diversity programs within the organization.

Expected Duration
5.0 hours

Lesson Objectives:

Communicating Through a Diversity Curriculum

  • recognize the importance of using a diversity curriculum to communicate information and build support for diversity adoption.
  • select the elements of a flexible organizational diversity training curriculum.
  • match types of personal-awareness diversity training with the characteristics of each type.
  • identify common formats for business-awareness diversity training.
  • match types of diversity-skills training with the main focus of each type.

    • Key Segment Communications and Diversity Adoption

  • recognize the importance of knowing how to reach specific employee segments when communicating a diversity plan.
  • determine whether a leader has considered the employee key segment variables when planning how to communicate the implementation of a diversity program, in a given scenario
  • choose the best target messages to encourage each of the five key segments of employees to adopt diversity.
  • match each key employee segment to its expected point of change adoption.

    • Communication Challenges in a Diverse Workplace

  • recognize the benefits of knowing how to communicate with diverse work groups.
  • use the four steps for communicating successfully in a diverse workplace.
  • apply the appropriate strategy to effectively deal with the three common communication challenges that affect the productivity of a diverse work group, given a scenario
  • use communication strategies for resolving conflict within a given diverse work group.
  • use the appropriate questions before giving feedback in a diverse work force.

    • Communicated Barriers to Workplace Diversity

  • recognize the importance of understanding the communicated barriers to workplace diversity programs.
  • follow the appropriate actions to identify barriers to diversity and inclusiveness, given a scenario.
  • identify four common racial and cultural barriers that are communicated in company policies and practices.
  • identify communicated obstacles for advancement of women in the workplace.

    • Course Number: HR0146