Diversity Training

Business Case

Pinnacle Telecommunications must provide diversity training to its employees to enhance their skill level, enabling the company to achieve its five strategic priorities. The company’s five strategic priorities include strong growth, creating a positive customer experience, driving growth by driving customer offerings, investment and development of its employees and continued growth in innovation. The training is essential in building an organization with a strong learning culture enabling it to keep up with its strategic direction. Addressing diversity issues at work is critical to ensuring the company positions itself effectively as a number one provider of telecommunication services (Amaram, 2011). When employees are trained on diversity, they become more aware of unconscious bias and other barriers to inclusion and diversity, which motivates positive attitudes and behaviours, all of which are important in creating and maintaining an inclusive and respectful workplace. Pinnacle Telecommunications hopes to have its workforce grow by 500% within the next five years and grow its customer base by 500% from five thousand small business customers within the same time frame. That means the company will face a diverse group of customers and employees. Through this training, the company will promote acceptance and respect for all various aspects of customers and employees. That would help it foster good customer relationships and achieve its objectives. The training program will also provide the company employees with practical strategies and tools that would help them manage conflicts and effective communication, promote workplace diversity and ultimately address the performance gap in the company (Henderson, 2020). Therefore, the employees will have the skills and knowledge needed to work in an inclusive and diverse environment and will understand how their actions impact other employees.

The training will address the performance gap brought about by inadequate employee diversity skills, which do not match the company’s culture. Company employees must enhance their diversity skills to show respect for their fellow employees. Increased diversity in this work would help to boost employees’ morale and instill in them the desire to work more efficiently and effectively, and therefore greater company productivity. Research shows that a diverse workforce has a high possibility of understanding customers’ needs, after which they come up with ideas to fulfill them. One of the company’s objectives is to grow its leadership in internet and wireless offerings by focusing on innovation. Increased workplace diversity would ensure the collaboration of like-minded people that think together and generate similar ideas, hence more significant innovation and creativity.

Further, the company wants to attract a wide range of consumers, so it needs to have a diverse workforce. Employees with varying age groups and gender would make the company appealing to many new opportunities. Employees will embrace and respect others from different backgrounds, and as a result, they will effectively connect with consumers from different walks of life (Henderson, 2020). When employees have the skills, knowledge and attitudes to recognize and manage diversity issues effectively, the company will achieve its set objectives.

Part 2: Lesson Plan

Learning Objectives

• Every employee and their managers should adhere to the organization’s inclusive culture for the company to grow to its potential. This first part of the workshop aims to build skills of company staff’s sensitivity toward gender stereotypes and misunderstandings, and successfully detect such unprofessional behaviour and stop them, making workplace communications professional and efficient. There will be a short quiz at the end of the session to recap and reinforce participants’ understanding of the concept, and further evaluation will be based on compliant follow-ups, manager’s review and peer reviews within six months to see if the participants have demonstrated an advanced understanding of the concept and acted upon it. An acceptable level of performance will be a net decrease in gender-diversity-related complaints and a boost in performance reviews due to participants demonstrating better communication skills with their team members.
• The employees and their managers must demonstrate mastery of the different age group dynamics and an understanding of the generational gap in the workplace. The second part of the workshop will reflect on the participant’s experiences and correct conceptual misinformation about age gaps and differences in workplaces, thus having a basic idea of ageism and building towards a more complex understanding of the underlying issues. Ultimately using the diverse age groups as the team’s advantage to obtain better performance and boost overall company growth. There will be a short quiz at the end of the session to review and bolster participant’s theatrical knowledge of the concepts behind the age gap; A manager performance review and peer review will be done within six months to evaluate if the participant is demonstrating efficiency growth by utilizing age diversity within their team as an asset.
• First-level and middle-management staff need to demonstrate a complete understanding of relative legislation (Human Rights Act, BCESA) regarding workplace discrimination based on gender and age. When an employee asks a question related to such a topic, they can confidently answer and steer clear of legal trouble. It also shows excellent support toward other staff members if the managers can provide solid facts and evidence to associate with when conflict arises. This third part of this workshop will be evaluated bi-annually using a short quiz format to help the participant refresh their memories. They can take the quiz multiple times until they obtain 100%, demonstrating a complete understanding of all relative legal terms.

Training Activities

• Lecture (Forty minutes on each learning session, preferably at the start of each session, two hours total) – This activity will use case studies and Instructor-led presentations as training methods. The facilitator will use a PowerPoint presentation to introduce basic concepts and theories to the participants with short case studies to tickle the participant’s minds with critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
• Role-playing activities (One hour) will use video-based and coaching training methods. The facilitator will show a short video on what is gender stereotypes. After the video, facilitators will facilitate role-playing of the employees in groups of four to six (or in their existing team) to enable them to act in a way that does not involve mentioned gender stereotypes and try to facilitate communications themselves. Using this method, the facilitator will be coaching one group of employees at a time, allowing them to learn, observe and act on the spot on how gender diversity is applied in the workplace. The facilitators may also use coaching to provide the employees with demonstrations first to ensure the employees receive adequate and consistent messages regarding diversity. Make sure participants understand the goal of role-playing – Acting out possible scenarios and practicing proper responses in a safe environment. 
• Role-playing activities (One hour) will use video-based, interactive and coaching training methods. The exact process can be used for generational gap awareness and gender diversity training workshops.
• Practical assessments and reviews (Forty minutes on the three learning objectives at the end of each workshop session, two hours total) – The employees summarize what they learned during the role-play and lecture and have group discussions and share their thoughts about materials of the day. The assessments will also include quizzes to measure how well the employees have grasped the context taught during the training. This activity utilized eLearning methods as all the quizzes can be done online at the participant’s own pace, and they can retake them at any time. Case studies can also be utilized for the discussion portion of this activity, albeit more straightforward cases are preferred if the time is running out.
  
  

Material(s) Required For the Activities

          Presentations, case studies and video training materials must be ready before the training. A training handbook detailing learning objectives and key terms can be helpful. Online quizzes need to be set up and answers double-checked before distributing.

References

Amaram, D. I. (2011). Cultural diversity: Implications for workplace management. Journal of Diversity Management, 2(4), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.19030/jdm.v2i4.5017

Henderson, G. I. (2020). Cultural diversity in the workplace. Academic Studies Press EBooks, 265–267. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1zjg3gs.29