Most Diversity Trainings Don’t Work. How Can We Do Diversity Training More Effectively?
Channel: Starts With Me
Date: 2022-11-15

Dr. Musa al-Gharbi, Ph.D in Sociology and Fellow at Columbia University discusses his findings and insights on how Diversity trainings fail, and how we can start planning them and implementing more effective practices.

This talk comes from the 2022 - State of Mind Workplace Mental Health Virtual Conference - State of Mind is a three-day mental health training conference designed to provide business leaders and HR professionals with the insights and strategies they need to implement best practices in workplace mental health. learn more here - https://startswithme.ca/state-of-mind-virtual-workplace-mental-health-conference/

A lot of employers found themselves with a much more heterogeneous labor pool all of a sudden um and so they had to face for the first time in many cases um some of the challenges that come with the benefits of diversity rate um so you have people with Divergent backgrounds Divergent perspectives Divergent life experiences working side by side for common goals um and at first there were huge blow ups there was a lot of lawsuits there was a lot of turnover um and so um and then layered on top of these kind of pressing organizational challenges that companies were dealing with um for with respect to productivity and things like this and retainment there were changes in the law um that that um so you know there was uh the passage of the Civil Rights Act there were as executive orders like um affirmative action there were Supreme Court rulings like Adams V Richardson that finally formally desegregated colleges in 1973 um and uh and so there were all these new workplace um these new rules and regulations that companies had to comply with as well and a lot of the laws that were passed were actually kind of vague like it wasn't clear uh what it meant to comply um with the rules um and so you had the development this is when you really started seeing the proliferation of HR professionals as well who were um doing that like figuring out what does it mean to to put these um these uh requirements that were like what does that mean in practice right uh and so as they're trying to sort through these this more diverse Workforce and comply with these new rules and regulations um a lot of companies reached for um for this training that have been developed um that that purported to be able to help groups help people from different backgrounds collaborate together and overcome their differences and things like this um the problem was there wasn't a lot of research on whether or not uh whether or not that training was effective because and it hadn't been most of this most of these training programs they had you know um pretty experimental carried out kind of small scale and all of a sudden they were put in all sorts of companies nationwide at a huge scale um and very in like practical settings not in like you know in small groups or um in controlled experiments things like this uh and so it was widely implemented starting in the late 80s uh mid 80s and early 90s and then over the decades that followed though um it started to become increasingly obvious that some of the problems that the training was supposed to solve didn't seem like they were being solved there were still a lot of conflict there's still a lot of turnover a lot of um organizations were still not diverse there were still lawsuits there were still bad PR happening and things like this and so um uh researchers started asking themselves like in becoming a lot more um empirically oriented to figuring out well does this stuff actually work uh in the in the picture that emerged from um from that research uh program uh hasn't been pretty in many respects uh but but so that's that's the big picture about sort of uh how we got here and and and and and as far as what the training is supposed to do I'll add um one problem with diversity training as it's currently practiced is that uh it's not always clear what the training is supposed to be doing like what concrete goals because there are kind of a lot of goals that the that companies are hoping to achieve through the training um so for instance they want to make sure they're complying with affirmative action equal opportunity laws and to demonstrate their compliance in court if needed uh they want to protect themselves from lawsuits

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