The importance of diversity not only means creating greater multicultural awareness and inclusion to help individuals with different backgrounds and their need to succeed, but it encourages acceptance and helps prepare those individuals to thrive in an exponentially diverse world.
We promote diversity awareness as leaders or mentors, but we must also take active participation in the process and be an example. By experiencing diversity, we are laying the groundwork to be comfortable while working and interacting with a variety of individuals of all nationalities and backgrounds.
At LearnMe we offer accredited training (Unit standard 252043 – Manage a diverse workforce to add value), that will assist your organisation in increasing understanding and support of diversity in the workplace.
This training is intended for managers in all economic sectors. These managers would typically be second level managers such as head of department, section heads or divisional heads, who may have more than one team reporting to them.
Why is Diversity Awareness Important?
Whether on campus or in the workforce, it’s important to celebrate different cultures, ethnic groups, and personal identities. This helps individuals feel they belong and have a seat at the table. Diversity awareness cultivates this sense of cultural sensitivity among massive groups of people.
Diversity awareness makes life easier for underrepresented groups of people in any or most situations. By encouraging this sense of understanding, people become lifelong learners about new cultures, developing sensitivity to those they’ll be in close contact with throughout the course of their work, school, or social lives. Additionally, it cultivates self-awareness about any unconscious biases or stereotyping in need of mitigation.
How to create Diversity Awareness
Individuals from diverse backgrounds can learn a lot from one another.
Here are tips to create diversity awareness within your own business:
- Address specific issues: Every business has a unique range of identarian and cultural groups. When presenting diversity training, tailor the experience to the distinct makeup of your staff without making anyone feel as though you have singled them out.
- Be open to questions: Spreading cultural diversity awareness means being open to questions and advancing a curious culture as well. Equip your staff to ask questions about other cultures. Provide information about individual cultures on request. Keep an open-door policy when it comes to feedback about how you could more adequately address individuals’ needs.
- Recruit a diverse body of individuals: Bringing together a diverse group of people from different backgrounds is an education in and of itself. This way, others can develop cultural awareness simply by developing organic relationships with people in their organisation. This helps people see and celebrate both shared values and individual differences.
- Set concrete rules: Diversity issues are very sensitive, so it is important to set up a work environment established on mutual respect for individuals’ innate personal dignity. There should be a standardised set of rules for everyone in the interest of fairness.
Diversity drives acceptance, creativity, and innovation. Every culture, every nationality, and every single individual sees the world in a different way. Similarly, every culture, nationality, and person have different knowledge and perspectives. When all these different views are shared together, miracles can happen.
Promoting and supporting diversity and inclusion in the workplace can be of great benefit to your organisation. Act now to increase your managers’ knowledge and understanding of diversity, and to get some fantastic strategies and tips from subject matter experts.
Should you want to book a training workshop on diversity in the workplace please send an email to byron@learnme.co.za.
Alternatively, if you are a director or owner of a company and wish to find out more, then please complete this short form below and our team will come back to you within 24 hours.