hole. They may also have the potential to get your company in serious legal trouble.
If employees point to the stereotypes in this training as contributing to a hostile work environment or constituting harassment in some way, you’ll have a big problem on your hands.
Reinforced Power Dynamic
Susana Rinderle eloquently explained in this Workforce column why a lot of cultural sensitivity training creates a harmful “we” vs. “them” mentality:
“Typically it carries an unspoken, even unconscious racial tone — a belief that white people need to be more sensitive to people of color, or to a particular racial or ethnic group. It reinforces a perceived or real power imbalance — a notion that the solution to a problem is that I be more sensitive to you. This implies that you are fragile and need to be handled gently so you don’t break. It also implies that the success of our relationship is entirely my responsibility — perhaps because you are incapable of being a full adult or equal partner.”
The onus for cultural competency should lie with every single member of your organization, not just certain groups. Click To Tweet
Lack of Actionable Takeaways
The wrong kind of cultural training focuses completely on the awareness component of diversity. It stops short of giving any useful information on how to use that new awareness to act in more inclusive ways.
Any diversity training program — or any employee training program, in general — absolutely needs to focus on actionable takeaways. It should also give employees a chance to practice using their new information.
At ELI, we call this live training our “flight simulator.” All employees get a chance to react in real time to tricky situations in a safe space. That way, when they have to react in real life, they’re more likely to be ready.
Establishing a Welcoming Culture
Wondering where your organization falls on the cultural competence scale?
Assessment tools do exist (just look at the National Center for Cultural Competence for some examples). They can be helpful if you are working in people-focused industries like healthcare and education.
However, we think there’s a better (and simpler) barometer of your company’s cultural competence. How comfortable do your employees feel speaking about their culture? How comfortable would they be pointing out something that offended them or made them feel uncomfortable at work?
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At ELI, we believe that the best approach to cultural competence is to establish a welcoming workplace culture. At every level of your company, workers need to know that they’re going to be respected and listened to. We call this a civil treatment workplace.
In a civil treatment workplace, leaders demonstrate values like respect and listening (even when presented with bad news), and they need to hold the rest of their staff accountable to do the same.
And if you’d like to talk to someone on the ELI team about our award-winning process for creating these civil treatment workplaces, please contact us.