Conducting Effective Sensitivity Training for Employees

While many people associate diversity and sensitivity training for employees with part of a corrective action plan following some sort of incident in the workplace, the truth is that your organization should be offering workplace diversity training regularly. Diversity and sensitivity training is centered around helping team members recognize their attitudes toward their coworkers and the behaviors that stem from them, including unconscious prejudices and microaggressions that may adversely affect productivity.

Every organization can benefit from having a staff that’s respectful of colleagues of different backgrounds, but ineffective online diversity and sensitivity training can make existing problems worse. Fortunately, Echo360 has created a learning engagement platform for everyone called EchoPoll, designed to help your organization with employee diversity and sensitivity training and your other e-learning needs. Please continue reading to learn more about what EchoPoll and our e³ philosophy can do for your workplace.

Our e3 philosophy consists of equity, engagement, and evidence. Equity in training means that every learner, whether they are in person or online, has the same opportunity to ask a question or participate in a group project. They have the same education in diversity as any other worker in the workplace. Echo360 provides a training platform that is geographically agnostic and accessible for both the learner and the instructor.

Engagement means that trainings are interesting and hold the attention of every worker to their successful completion. Sensitivity training can be a delicate subject, but it should be a training experience that workers look forward to each day. Our learning platform has an easy-to-use interface with options for gamification, multimedia authoring, live instruction, and more to drive remarkable engagement experiences in sensitivity training. Training with Echo360 is remarkably engaging at all levels.

Evidence means that we are committed to empirical measurements that provide the information that your sensitivity training instructors rely on to deliver the best outcomes for all sensitivity training students. While assessments are important, metrics are much more than test scores. Our robust hybrid learning platform gives your instructors the opportunity to leverage personalized sensitivity training feedback along the way. With our rich analytics and diagnostics, your instructors will be aware of any issues long before it’s time for the assessment and has a way to deal with them effectively.

What are the benefits of successful workplace sensitivity training?

Workplace diversity and sensitivity training programs promote mutual understanding among team members, facilitating more efficient teamwork and boosting productivity. Everyone brings a unique perspective and combining them is often the best way to approach challenging problems.

Sensitivity training can also help management understand who their employees are as people, making it easier to motivate your group daily and identify strong candidates for promotion regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, age, background, religion, or sexual orientation.

Sensitivity training is an excellent way for workers to accept their differences and strengthen their character. They can learn to properly separate business and personal and be more effective in what they do. Managers should encourage their employees to enroll in sensitivity training, but not force them. Otherwise, your group may not be as motivated to complete the training.

Workplace sensitivity training enforcement can have a negative impact on the business as a whole. But if you can get your employees to buy into the sensitivity training concept, it will be much easier for you to later nudge them into doing things the right way. In the long run, training can make your company much more successful.

Diversity training programs can help employees overcome anxiety. Each individual may have their own fears and concerns related to their own job and their competence to complete their tasks within the workplace. Awareness training can help them recognize their own stressors and overcome them.

Say your employees are struggling with a difficult problem or dealing with a particular issue. If so, effective training is one of the tools they can use to overcome the problem. It’s important that you and your staff both take the training seriously. That way, the diversity training program sessions will help workers and managers overcome their job-related concerns.

Effective diversity training will encourage open communication between workers and their superiors. Everyone in the workplace should feel free to speak up during training and outside of training, whether it’s about the job or troubles in the workplace. Diversity should be treated as a benefit to communication rather than a barrier. There may be racial, gender, age, or other differences in your group of workers that cause unintentional bias and a lack of inclusion.

During the training, tell your employees what you expect from them. Allow them to be honest with you. Don’t get upset if they don’t represent your ideals perfectly. Deal with their opinions without being critical or rude. That way, you show them their opinion is important to you.

Listen to what your group members have to say and take them seriously. By showing that you care for their opinions and thoughts, you may spark an interest in them. At the same time, let them know that there are certain opinions or thoughts that are not appropriate in the workplace.

Sensitivity training also boosts emotional intelligence. This is the ability to perceive, interpret, demonstrate, control, and use emotions to communicate with and relate to others effectively and constructively. If an employee has never met a person from a particular cultural background, they may not feel confident communicating with them. During diversity training, they will have the opportunity to meet and communicate with people from various cultures in the workplace and improve their emotional intelligence. Programs that allow individuals from different racial, gender, religious, and age backgrounds to interact naturally are the most effective for people from all backgrounds.

Sensitivity training can improve employees’ effectiveness in handling conflict. During training, individual group members will learn how to defuse a dispute and stay calm in heated situations. When individuals have had time to process sensitivity training, they are more likely to be able to overcome conflict because of increased cultural competency. It is best to implement sensitivity training before issues arise, but it can be an effective tool no matter when the training takes place.

Not only do workers benefit from training, but the company itself does as well. For example, when HR and the company as a whole promote sexual harassment training and discourage sexual harassment in the workplace, it is less likely they will deal with litigation related to discrimination and harassment. Promoting a culture of inclusion happens during training but also once the programs have ended. It is an ongoing responsibility of every member of the company from the top down.

Online sensitivity training can play a role in your broader upskilling program by encouraging employees to practice self-reflection, increase their emotional intelligence, and better understand how to work with individuals who communicate differently from themselves.

What is required for effective diversity training for employees?

Many companies throw together a few PowerPoint slides on how to be less racist and call it sensitivity training for employees. Such passive courses are likely to be resented by the very group or groups of people they are intended to help. If you want your program to produce results, direct communication between different groups of people is essential.

EchoPoll allows you to host live sensitivity training classes directly on our platform, making it easy to bring employees together for an open, honest conversation about your organization’s culture. After all, awareness is the first step. If you have employees who cannot attend the live class in the workplace, no problem. EchoPoll also records live sessions so that asynchronous learners can access them on-demand and enjoy equity in access to the material.

Online sensitivity training in the workplace broaches some touchy topics like diversity in the workplace, inclusion, and sexual harassment, and some of your employees may benefit from discussing them with managers or colleagues in a 1-on-1 environment. EchoPoll offers breakout rooms with powerful communication features such as video chat and screen sharing to facilitate these private interactions. Instructors can pop in and out as well, so your organization will still be able to keep tabs on the discussions for appropriateness and compliance. This type of training program works on skills meant to change the culture of the workforce, one worker at a time.

When you’re putting together an entirely asynchronous class, you will find EchoPoll especially helpful. It has an intuitive and quick interface for course creation, including dozens of block types and interactive templates like assessments, matching exercises, flashcards, and interactive videos. It’s easy to edit, so you can always keep your classes up to date.

You can use gating for learner progress control. To make your sensitivity training effective, insert required interactions, like an assessment question, that the user has to complete before they can move on to the next slide. You can monitor learner progress from your LMS and intercede where necessary, or use the information to revise your content if needed.

Each item you create within your sensitivity training class is stored individually. They can be accessed outside of the lesson you create them for. This makes it easy to grab a video and use it in multiple sensitivity training classes or to grab a set of awareness flashcards and deploy them to a learner who needs more help with certain concepts.

You can also add CC (closed captioning) to videos you create using EchoVideo, making the lessons accessible to hearing-impaired workers. This goes a long way toward making your inclusion training program truly inclusive.

Employers can also benefit from the powerful EchoExam program that comes as part of Echo360’s Echosystem. An important part of diversity training is making sure that each individual in the workplace has understood what they are learning in their courses. While a lot of this assessment will happen in person, most companies will include a traditional assessment to determine whether the workers understand basic inclusion and diversity concepts.

Creating an assessment couldn’t be easier with EchoExam. It comes with built-in question banks on a variety of topics, so you simply choose the topic you want and the exam is automatically generated. Then you go through and edit the assessment until it looks the way you want it to. You get to determine how many questions are multiple-choice, short-answer, and other types. You can choose up to 26 iterations of the same exam to discourage answer sharing (aka cheating) among workers.

Assessment results are sent directly to sortable dashboards, allowing you to see the results in real time. You can then take action based on the results. You can enroll some learners in remedial courses on inclusion if they need additional assistance. Using a simple menu, you can place workers in a specific training program. You can also use EchoExam to create important assignments for your workers, whether you want to create an assignment for everyone or for specific learners who need some help on specific topics.

EchoPoll also makes it easy to collect evidence on learner progress in the workplace. The platform automatically tracks attendance for both synchronous and asynchronous learners, allowing you to take action if somebody isn’t showing up. Most importantly, EchoPoll facilitates two-way feedback so that learners can share their ideas on improving your organization’s sensitivity training for employees with their managers. You might be surprised by the ideas they come up with

How can my company implement sensitivity training with effective training for diversity?

Online sensitivity training is definitely a situation where good enough training isn’t good enough, so you want the best tools available to you. Book a demo today and discover the functionality of EchoPoll for yourself! It could be one of the most important things you ever do for your organization.

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Conducting Effective Sensitivity Training for Employees

What are the benefits of successful workplace sensitivity training?

What is required for effective diversity training for employees?

How can my company implement sensitivity training with effective training for diversity?

Get a demo

Get a demo

OR

Sign Up Today

Best-In-Class Learning Management Solution

Question Types

Reporting & Analytics

Dynamic Bimodal Versioning

I Want More Engaging Interactive Lectures in My Classroom

ExploreEchoPoll.

Learn more about what it can do for your organization

Leading educational institutions are inspiring learning with Echo360.

Related Resources

Customer testimonials, pedagogical articles about teaching and learning, and new product updates and features.

Real-Time Polls Make Classroom Management More Efficient

Why Polling in the Classroom Leads to Better Student Outcomes

What Is Competency Based Education (CBE)?

The Echosystem is our dynamic model of customized solutions that correspond to the relationship, environment, content, and assessment required:

We make it easy to bring learning to life — anywhere.

Hybrid Learning

Video Management

Engagement Outcomes

Reporting & Analytics

LMS Integration

Accessibility

Brock University

University of Kentucky

Northampton Community College

Enabling inspiration and access to students, wherever they are.

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