Creating Equality Diversity Strategy
2nd December 2014
No matter what your institution, business or other workplace environment, creating a unified vision where inclusion and diversity is valued by all is of utmost importance. Long-term success in any organisation is only achievable by including people from all backgrounds and sections of society. By making sure they’re all equally a part of the working community and truly valued for their contributions, staff members will flourish in their respective roles and succeed.
There is no such thing as a typical citizen and this means there will be no such thing as a typical employee or student. People’s concerns and general needs differ: between men and women, young and old, disabled and non-disabled people, not to mention people from different educational, social and cultural backgrounds. Understanding the needs of different groups of people is inherently linked to providing not only a better working environment for all, but also for improving the productivity, morale and engagement of the organisation as a whole.
It’ s important, to make sure that you have a strategy for equality and diversity training in your organisation. This can at first seem like a rather daunting task, and it can be quite difficult to know where to start. That’ why we have put together this blog post in order to help you create a set of guidelines, goals and milestones so that inclusion can be at the forefront of your working organisational model.
But before we start, let’ s go over some of the key terms so that everyone can understand what equality, diversity, and human rights really mean.
Equality
Equality does not actually mean that everyone should be treated the same. Rather that employees should be treated differently according to their needs, so that the outcome is that everyone receives a treatment of fairness and respect. Essentially, it’s equality of opportunity that should be the focus, and this means that equal access should always be promoted.
Diversity
Diversity means that differences in people are recognised and valued by all in equal measure. The understanding of how people’s differences and similarities can be of benefit to the organisation as a whole, is at the heart of diversity.
Human Rights
Put simply, human rights are the basic freedoms that belong to every single person living in the world. They’re based on fairness, dignity, respect, equality and autonomy. Human rights are relevant to everybody in their day-to-day lives, inside the workplace or organisation, or out of it. Human rights ensure that everyone has fair and equal access to services, and equal opportunities in the organisation.
Next Step Working Out Your Objectives
So, now we have established the key terms you will use in your Equality and Diversity strategy, the next thing to do is create a list of objectives for the training.
The following could be used as a template.
Equality And Diversity Training Objectives:
- To embed equality, diversity and inclusion into leadership policies and management systems more effectively.
- To ensure communications and policy design build on the engagement with the diversity of the workforce.
- To improve the skills and the working environment needed to foster diversity and equality.
- To increase the diversity of all staff at all levels.
- To improve the ability of all staff to reach their potential by building equality into how management of staff performance is completed and promoted.
As a manager, it will be your responsibility to ensure that a culture of equality and diversity is promoted in the workplace, and the objectives outlined above are established in your training and communication.
Once you’ve set out your objectives, you’ll then need to create a list of exactly what you will do to implement each of them within your training program.
Choosing Your Training
Every workplace and organisation will of course be different, and that means that there cannot be a one-size-fits-all training solution to bring your organisation in line with equality and diversity requirements.
Here at Marshall ACM, we offer a wide range of equality and diversity training courses that can all be tailored to meet your specific requirements. Our Diversity in the Workplace is essential courseware for all organisations looking to start to build an equality and diversity training strategy. To bolster this, we have created a range of further e-learning courses that cover everything from cultural awareness to unconscious bias and can all be found on our products page. If there’ s anything that you cannot find, then please get in touch so that we can assist on building the equality and diversity training that’s right for you.
Watch our short video about the workplace benefits of equality and inclusion:
