Diversity and Inclusion Training

Diversity and Inclusion Training

by Felicity Menzies

Signature Programs

Include-Empower.Com offers a variety of diversity and inclusion training programs for developing inclusion and diversity capability and for empowering diverse talent to achieve their full potential.

Customised Solutions

We have a strong client focus and we provide more than simply generic programs or guidance. We understand that the business environment is complex and that our clients face unique and varied challenges and opportunities. We partner deeply with our clients to design and facilitate tailored change programs that produce measurable returns. No matter how complex your business environment, we have the capabilities and experience to move you forward.

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Signature Programs

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Include

Today’s best-practice diversity management involves an organisational culture that values, embraces and celebrates individual differences. Diversity practitioners and researchers refer to this as inclusion.

Inclusive Leadership


Inclusive Leadership Training assists leaders in understanding their implicit assumptions and prejudgments and seeks to improve their motivation to work with and the empower diverse groups.

Drawing on the six traits of inclusive leaders, our Inclusive Leadership workshop develops leaders’ commitment to inclusion and diversity, their courage to challenge attitudes and practices that yield homogeneity, their curiosity for and openness to different ideas, their ability to build collaborative workplaces, a cognisance of their own and others biases, and their cultural intelligence.

Engaging Men in Gender Equality


Engaging men as agents of change is critical to advancing gender equality. There are a number of obstacles, however, that prevent men from taking concrete actions necessary for challenging the status quo.

Our Engaging Men in Gender Equality Workshop seeks to engage male leaders in gender diversity efforts by developing participants’ motivation for and commitment to advancing gender equality and by transferring concrete strategies for advancing gender equality.

Developing Psychological Safety and a Speak-Up Culture


Research shows that if you want to create teams capable of innovating you need diversity. But diversity, per se, if not enough. Without psychological safety, individuals may be reluctant to speak up and you may miss out on breakthrough ideas, learning from mistakes, and the raising of valid concerns or red flags. By creating a team climate that reduces the interpersonal risks of speaking up, the team will be rewarded with better decisions, creative collaboration, motivated members, and improved performance.

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Unconscious Bias & Mindful Inclusion


Unconscious bias refers to attitudes and beliefs we hold towards particular social or cultural groups that occur outside of conscious awareness and influence our responses.

Unconscious bias in recruitment, selection, promotion, development, and everyday workplace interaction limits the potential that can flow from a diverse workforce for higher-quality problem solving and decision-making, innovation and creativity, accessing diverse customers and suppliers, and attracting and energising top global talent.

Reducing unconscious bias at work is a critical component of an organisation’s efforts to create a diverse and inclusive work setting in which all employees contribute fully to work processes.

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Eliminating Bias in Recruitment & Selection


Unconscious bias training assists hiring managers in understanding their implicit assumptions and prejudgments. It seeks to reduce bias in recruitment and selection by transferring skills for objective hiring practices and developing hiring managers’ ability to monitor and manage their own and other’s bias.

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Cultural Intelligence & Inclusion


Cultural inclusion requires a different set of competencies to the ‘gender smarts’ required for gender inclusion. A culturally inclusive work setting requires a culturally intelligent workforce and leadership. Cultural intelligence is positively associated with workgroup cohesion, integration, trust and performance in diverse cultural settings. Cultural intelligence predicts the formation of diverse networks and the sharing and integration of information and ideas. Cultural intelligence dismantles ‘us vs them’ social categorisations and negative stereotypes and enhances intercultural understanding and respect — workplace incivility, harassment and discrimination are lower. Workers with cultural intelligence experience higher levels of sociocultural adjustment and psychological well-being and lower levels of stress.

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Developing Asia Capability


Strengthening Asia capability involves a three-pronged approach: winning the war for local talent across diverse Asian markets, leveraging the perspectives and experiences of Australian talent with Asian heritage, and increasing the cultural competency of Australia’s non-Asian workforce.

Achieving these goals necessitates the development of cultural intelligence or CQ—the collection of knowledge, skills and abilities that enable an individual to detect, assimilate, reason and act on cultural cues appropriately.

As a transcultural model of intercultural competence, cultural intelligence is a set of generic competencies ideally suited to managing the complexities of diverse Asian settings.

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Cultural Intelligence for Universities


As Australian tertiary campuses are increasingly global and diverse, cultural differences in attitudes, values, beliefs and norms for appropriate behaviour present new challenges for teaching effectiveness. Our Cultural Intelligence for Universities program draws on the expertise of the Cultural Intelligence Centre, LLC to provide faculty with strategies and tips for creating an inclusive classroom environment and teaching a culturally diverse population of students. A culturally inclusive classroom is one where students and staff alike recognise, appreciate and capitalise on diversity so as to enrich the overall learning experience.

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Innovating with Inclusion - Coming Soon


The greater variety of ideas and perspectives accompanying a diverse workforce challenges and changes existing business practices and assumptions to drive innovation in an organisation’s practices, products and services.

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Looking for more? Bite-Sized Learning


We recognise that the pace of organisational life requires short, sharp learning interventions. We also know that building diversity and inclusion capability requires more than a one-off training program. Developing inclusive mindsets and behaviours is an iterative process. Successive learning interventions offer opportunities for reflection, build on past learnings, and prompt the discovery of new insights.

Our bite-sized diversity and inclusion workshops support an organisation’s diversity and inclusion efforts by offering cost-effective opportunities for groups of up to 60 participants to refresh and extend their awareness of diversity and inclusion issues in an interactive manner over one to two hours.

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Empower

Members from underrepresented groups face unique challenges in their journey to leadership. Inclusive workplaces recognise the different needs of diverse employees and design and implement tailored professional development to address those challenges.

Advancing Women in Leadership Program

Studies confirm that women experience and are perceived to have lower levels of confidence in professional settings compared with men. The gender confidence gap widens significantly within only two to five years of entering the workforce.

Lower levels of confidence prevent female talent from contributing fully to the workplace and achieving their full potential, negatively impacts the career progression of women—hampering organisational efforts to build a pipeline of female leaders for executive-level roles, and contributes to the gender pay gap.

Addressing the gender confidence gap is a critical component of an organisation’s efforts to empower female talent and drive higher levels of gender diversity at senior leadership.

Include-Empower.Com’s Advancing Women in Leadership Program enhances intrinsic self-confidence and transfers skills for communicating with confidence when interacting with peers, managers and subordinates as well as with stakeholders external to the organisation.

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Group Mentoring for Emerging Female Leaders


Researchers have identified a variety of factors that contribute to a ‘glass ceiling’ that prevents emerging female leaders from achieving senior executive roles at the same rate as men. These include lower levels of confidence, weaker access to informal networks, lack of role models, and unconscious bias.

Mentoring is an established technique for empowering professional women to manage those challenges.

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Group Mentoring for Emerging Culturally Diverse Leaders


Compared with members of the culturally dominant group, culturally diverse talent face unique challenges in their journey to leadership.

Cultural diversity enhances the potential for language and other communication barriers and heightens the risk of ambiguity, value conflicts, and reasoning and decision-making differences. Also, cultural stereotypes and bias can threaten rapport, stifle the exchange of information and ideas, hamper career progression, and are linked to workplace bullying and harassment. Those challenges can impact employee well-being and engagement.

Mentoring is an established technique for empowering emerging culturally diverse leaders to manage those challenges.

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Intercultural Coaching for Individuals


Cultural intelligence (CQ) coaching offers guidance to individuals seeking to understand their intercultural strengths and weaknesses and develop their effectiveness in diverse cultural settings.

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Looking for more? Bite-Sized Learning


We recognise that the pace of organisational life requires short, sharp learning interventions. We also know that building diversity and inclusion capability requires more than a one-off training program. Developing inclusive mindsets and behaviours is an iterative process. Successive learning interventions offer opportunities for reflection, build on past learnings, and prompt the discovery of new insights.

Our bite-sized diversity and inclusion workshops support an organisation’s diversity and inclusion efforts by offering cost-effective opportunities for groups of up to 60 participants to refresh and extend their awareness of diversity and inclusion issues in an interactive manner over one to two hours.

Learn more

Customisation

Young ethnic aboriginal Australian businesswoman seated at meeting room table by laptop computer modern office. Portrait looking to camera of a female business professional in Australia.

Market and Participant Diversity

Diversity management has developed largely in the United States—but diversity impacts organisations differently across the globe.

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Diversity issues vary from one country to the next, and they are often more complex outside the United States. Effective global diversity management needs adaptation to reflect different cultural contexts. At a minimum, adaptation should occur nationally. Regional changes should also be considered. Modification may be required to the content, rationale, language, and methods.

Industry and Organisation

We undertake extensive research to understand the unique D&I challenges facing an industry and organisation.

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We use that information to work with clients to articulate the business case for training, identify metrics for measuring return on training investment, and to design relevant and meaningful experiential learning.

Role

Workshop content and activities are tailored to address the role demands of participants.

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More intensive training is required for individuals who engage in frequent, critical, and complex exchanges with diverse others. We differentiate between individual contributors, people managers, and leaders.

Developmental Needs

Consideration is given to inclusion competency strengths and weaknesses, career development plans, past experience with diversity and inclusion, and motivation for training.

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We assess the inclusion capabilities and cultural profiles of your leaders, workgroups and individual contributors and apply the results to drive self-awareness of strengths and developmental areas.

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Our Difference

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Experiential-Centered Design

Consistent with research on adult learning, we believe that the best learning outcomes result when participants engage holistically with program content.

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All Include-Empower.Com learning and development programs incorporate experiential learning techniques and include a mix of videos, small-group activities and simulations, wider-group activities, case studies, and opportunities to reflect on and apply learnings to the real-life challenges facing participants.

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Evidence-Based Competency Models

Our commitment to evidence-based solutions ensures that every Include-Empower.Com learning program is supported by robust scientific findings and best-practices.

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An evidence-based approach to inclusion competency increases the likelihood that skills are transferred back to the workplace.

Our work draws from the fields of social and cross-cultural psychology, cognitive neuroscience, diversity and inclusion management, human resource management and global leadership.

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Inclusive Instruction

An inclusive approach to diversity training decreases the risk of alienating members of the dominant group by avoiding an emphasis on ‘us vs. them’.

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Our programs reinforce that every employee is both an ingroup and outgroup member under different circumstances. This decreases the risk of backlash and defensiveness that can result from poorly designed programs.

Our Approach

Agreement on Key Program Objectives & Metrics

Specifying training objectives and identifying business metrics to measure the transfer of learnings to the workplace is an important part of implementing effective training programmes.

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Include-Empower.Com partners with clients to identify key training objectives and measurables that align with business strategy. Key areas of focus might involve improved engagement and retention, greater representation at management or leadership level, higher levels of customer satisfaction, market growth, innovation. Program objectives and related metrics will be used to tailor workshop content and activities.

Pilot Program

Pilot-testing is an important aspect of quality control in training to ensure that an organisation’s training investment results in measurable change.

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Pilot workshops offer clients an opportunity to assess and make recommendations regarding the effectiveness and relevance of content and activities to be included in a wider roll-out across the business.

The purpose of a pilot workshop is to gain feedback from participants to ensure the workshop is engaging, relevant and useful to participants as well as to test the knowledge, skills and attitudes acquired during the session.

The information gathered from the pilot will be used to strengthen and improve the course content, materials, and delivery strategies for the wider roll-out.

Ongoing Support

Effective training has a business impact. Include-Empower.Com works with clients to review progress on program metrics post-training and offers ongoing recommendations for extending or improving outcomes from the training investment.

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Formal reviews are suggested at 3 and 12-months post training, however our experts offer leadership support and advice regarding the training program and outcomes at any time.

Other Solutions

Our services span advisory, strategy, implementation, diagnostics, and capability-building, all with the singular focus to help clients achieve maximum value.

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Get in Touch

Do you have any questions about our expertise or our services? We’d love to hear from you.

Contact us today