Diversity Training in Organizations
Diversity in the workplace involves employing diverse characteristics, such as gender, age, race or ethnicity, distinct skills, expertise, etc. The main advantages for diversity include encouragement of specialization, fair distribution of tasks and duties, having a diverse pool of ideas that aid in decision making, and many more benefits. Therefore, since an industrial psychologist deals directly with people, I significantly impacted in many ways.
If you were to develop your different training plans for an organization, what would you do? What parts of the training do you think would have to be present for it to work?
After reading Essentials of Organizational Behavior by Robbins and Judge (2018), I think I would need to develop a training plan that would identify the needs of employees, define the primary objective of the training program, preparation of resources for study or presentation, and I will also formulate quiz test that encompasses diverse topics. Some of the questions adopted from Robbins and Judge may include questions such as “how regularly have you heard someone say, “Oh, you’re just being emotional? Are people in their best moods on the weekends? (Robbins and Judge, 2018, p67) These questions can be considered as denoting diversity because, women and men portray different abilities in controlling their emotions. Therefore, these are very crucial parts of the training that must be there for the success of the training. Surveys are also important in supporting the training materials and resources. Besides, the main objective for the training program would be to enable workers to be able to acknowledge diversity at the workplace and to appreciate the differences in people.
A variety of industries have unique problems that come with a lack of understanding of diversity. Can you think of any industries struggling with a lack of diversity? How can diversity training be tailored to these industries?
After reading the Essentials of Organizational Behaviors by Robbins and Judge (2018) and Tony Schwartz article, people react differently with the change in their working environment. For instance, Google is one of the Tech companies that is struggling with unique problems for lack of diversity. The company is currently being impacted by numerous lawsuits from former employees for both not substantially promoting diversity and too much diversification. What then, is the best way to deal with diversification? How can diversity be tailored to these organizations without creating more problems with the workers? One of the best way that tailor training for diversity is to first of all identify the individual differences among workers. Understanding the individual differences would enable the industrial psychologist be able to establish appropriate training materials. Another way is to change the organization’s culture towards a culture that integrates diverse factors such as employment of both men and women for gender equality (Robbins and Judge, 2018, p297).
Do you think diversity training is effective? If so what about it makes it effective? If not, what would you do to improve diversity outcomes in organizations?
“After reading Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time by Tony Schwartz (2007), I have learned that “establishing simple rituals such as training for diversity is can lead to striking results across organizations” (Schwartz, 2007, p64). For instance, organizations need to change their cultures to focus more on investing on their employees than reaping more benefits on employees alone (Schwartz, 2007, p64). Therefore, diversity training is effective because enables employees to be conscious about what programs to implement in their organization or be how to change the culture. It also improves the working environment that which increases employee’s job satisfaction and motivation (Schwartz, 2007, p ) besides, diversity training improves the workers Emotional Intelligence (EI), which is the ability perceive individual and other people’s emotions and understand the meaning of these emotions (Robbins and Judge, 2018, p70). However, what are the challenges that might face diversity training program in an organization?”
References
Robbins, Stephen, and Timothy Judge. Essentials of Organizational Behaviour. 14th ed., London, England, Pearson, 2018, pp. 31–393, b-ok.cc/book/3556435/3c7509. Accessed 11 May 2020.
Schwartz, T. (2007). Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time. Harvard Business Review.