Modern technology has advanced a lot. One of the most profound impacts of this technology is its role in bringing people closer together and making geographical boundaries less relevant. Diversity or cultural awareness are heated topics of discussion these days in the workplace. That is since diversity is both an ethical imperative for business and a means to reinvigorate the bottom line.
To build a diverse and innovative workplace if possible for small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), it is important to adopt some inclusive best practices. You need cultural assessment tools along with someone who can guide you to utilise them perfectly. This indicates hiring a cross-cultural trainer for the company as a company culture consultant.
Cultural awareness training allows you to optimise your own business for success. However, you must understand the importance of this training if you want to reap the benefits you are looking for.
A diverse workplace is optimised to attain success – Diversity optimises a business rooting for success by fostering empathy and developing an internal company culture that believes in placing its priorities on its people.
Cultural awareness training creates opportunity – Research shows that cultural differences are correlated with sets of shared values and behaviours. It is important to ensure that everyone understands each other well enough to work effectively together.
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Tips to establish a cross-cultural awareness training program
- You must offer the employees flexibility in how they train themselves.
- You must ensure that your training covers a spectrum of cultures.
- You must adapt training to different learning styles.
- You must engage your team in discussions.
- You must be open to receiving feedback.
Why is Cultural Awareness important?
Culture Awareness is important to resolve issues related to diversity all around the world. The scenarios that need cultural awareness are:
- Demographic shifts are happening and there is a rapid increase in a diverse population.
- Societies all around the world are increasingly becoming globalised.
- There is a constant persistence of issues around cross-cultural contact, discrimination, and related challenges.
- There is a spread of discrimination and bias in various forms that are hurtful all around.
Tips to Build Skills in Cultural Competence
The various tips that lead to a culturally enlightened world are:
- Increase cultural and global knowledge
- Self-assessment practices are recommended
- Go beyond tolerance: Build skills and put them into action
- Active Listening is an essential key to cultural competence.
- Empathy builds in the capacity to feel for others leading to better understanding and bonding.
- Engagement is beneficial and is a process of reciprocal learning experience where you get the opportunity to learn from others.
What is Diversity/ Cultural Training?
From basic cross-cultural awareness to developing valuable diversity cultural skills, a company’s success depends upon how effectively the right tools and support are provided to its employees. These tools should be in a state to function to maximise every employee’s development and performance.
The training is divided into two general categories: awareness-based training, and skill-based training.
Awareness-Based Training
This is usually a sensitizer for employees. It deals with the task of making employees aware of the importance of diversity. It also helps to draw attention to employees’ own prejudices, and the cultural assumptions they have about others. This type of training uses case studies and experiential exercises for diversity training implementation.
Skill-Based Training
This type of training involves developing and improving employees’ proficiency in handling diverse situations in the workplace. Various cultural assessment tools are used to help move employees from the stage of awareness to the proficiency stage.
10 Tips to implement Effective Diversity Training
1. Diversity should be a Daily Practice
Exiguous cross-cultural/diversity training that takes place for a few hours a couple of times a year is not an effective way to promote awareness. To ensure that your diversity training program is effective, awareness and inclusion must be a part of the everyday workplace.
The most compelling way to promote everyday diversity training is to put a calendar to use to promote awareness in the following ways:
- Monthly Themes – Include the monthly diversity heritage themes in the office calendar to bring awareness to the diverse groups.
- Religious Events – Many religious holidays and practices affect an employee’s time and efficiency in the workplace. Most workplaces acknowledge Christian holidays but aiming to include other religions in the list of holidays in your calendar promotes inclusivity and encourages employees to be respectful of their coworkers’ religious obligations.
2. Be clear about your Training Goals
Training materials in diversity training programs are frequently selected without keeping in mind the goals they are meant to promote. In your diversity training, you must aim to make your goals as clear as possible to your employees. Think critically about what you want your employees to take away from training.
3. Try to get support from all levels
Before you initiate any serious diversity training effort, ensure you have support from top management. To access the resources required for an effective diversity training program, you need permission and resources from above.
4. You should aim for Respectful, Tolerant Behaviour
The primary aim of diversity training is to promote effective, productive teamwork. It is a step crucial to diminishing and eliminating barriers to such teamwork.
5. Get the right materials for your people
Different people and workplaces have different ethics and environment types and thus require different types of training and materials. You must take advantage of the wide range of resources available to curate a program for your specific audience.
This can include the usage of new technologies. There are many online diversity training programs and software available to experiment with. These turn out to be cost-effective, efficient, and useful in providing necessary evaluation tools.
6. Promote Engagement
For diversity training to be effective, it is a must to engage employees. You must experiment with different ways to engage your audience.
7. Post-Assessment
Every diversity training should include a follow-up stage, in which an evaluation takes place after the training to maintain a continuous training improvement rate. CQ – Cultural Intelligence checks or measures your ability to work in a culturally diverse workplace.
8. Diversified Events
Diversity training should always involve key diversity events for higher productivity, easier scheduling and holiday planning, and to work to ensure diverse groups within the workplace get proper respect and recognition.
9. Diversity means more than just Cultural Facts
To raise awareness, your training should go beyond the surface-level knowledge of the differences in cultures. Different customs, respective holidays, proper greetings, and modes of observance must be communicated to raise awareness and boost understanding.
10. Be Patient
The most challenging step of a diversity training program is to be patient while waiting to see results. Miracles do not take place overnight; employees are not capable of reaching epiphanies through one training session. Any effective change takes time, but ultimately, the change that emerges provides a high return on your investment.
Conclusion
The primary goal of a successful cultural awareness training program is to create a positive work environment by guiding employees to recognize and be tolerant of differences among co-workers. This training presents an opportunity for employers to educate their employees about the value diversity holds, and while it cannot alter an individual’s personal beliefs completely, it still can have the power to increase awareness, impart knowledge, and educate employees on how they can accept differences among others.