Why your EDI training isn’t working
If you spend any length of time on LinkedIn or looking for answers to your equity, diversity and inclusion questions, you will soon get a sense that people are becoming frustrated by this work.
Those who might describe themselves as EDI practitioners are frustrated largely by the lack of or waning commitment from leaders of organisations, and leaders cannot see a return on their investment.
Over the last few years, some organisations have thrown thousands of pounds at this. One organisation which springs to mind has invested in the last two years upwards of £200k on this in the form of appointments, training and other projects. Any organisation investing this sort of money is going to want to see results. However, there are often some fundamental flaws in the way the work was embarked on. These can include:
Being forced into the work following some sort of trigger, without thinking about how or why the work needs to be done.
Assuming that getting someone in to deliver training is going to solve the problem.
Giving full responsibility for EDI to one or a small number of individuals.
Next to salaries, training is most often the next biggest spend when it comes to EDI work. When we are spending tens of thousands of pounds on training we might be forgiven for expecting the learning to result in change but there are some fundamental reasons why this doesn’t follow.
The training was not bespoke to the organisations needs.
In these cases, organisations often want to deliver input quickly and know what it is their organisation is getting. Standardised learning is often cheaper because there is no additional creation time involved. These reasons are understandable but it means that a garden centre gets the same training as a clinic, school, theatre or clothes retailer. The lack of nuance can mean that attendees at training will say, ‘I can’t see how this applies to the work I do’.
If people can’t see and feel the relevance to their role, way of living and context, they can quite understandably interpret the training as ignorable. Moreover, if they haven’t been guided on how they could apply the learning to their roles, are we being fair in expecting them to interpret something they may never have been exposed to before? They then ignore the learning, and fail to implement any useful or transferable strategies contained within the training.
Leaders didn’t take part in the training
Far too often, we see leaders organising training that is then given to everyone in the organisation but them. Here’s the problem, people in leadership positions are often the very people upholding the status quo which inevitably contains discriminatory systems and processes. If leaders do not think that any EDI training applies to them, they will continue to maintain the status quo which will lead to:
Them as individuals and the organisation as a whole delivering microaggressions and exclusionary practices.
Employees and stakeholders losing trust and faith in leaders and either.
Ignoring any instruction to become more inclusive because they can see leaders are not.
Becoming disenfranchised with leaders and disappointed in their conduct and lack of commitment to EDI. This can lead to reputational harm too.
Leaders, EDI practitioners and early adopters of inclusive practice stop learning.
If we think about the building blocks of learning to read, all things being equal we probably mastered the nuts and bolts of reading and decoding words between the age of 5-8. We didn’t just stop there, though did we. We added more difficult words, tried new authors, explored new genres until we became fluent readers. Of course, there are exceptions to this, but hopefully this analogy makes the point.
EDI is the same. You need to continue to learn and develop and unfortunately, once the initial pieces of training on EDI topics happened, it was seen as done and the learning stopped.
This has revealed some significant problems:
People within dominant groups were very proud of themselves for their initial work, and now people with excluded identities are disappointed that people stopped learning and fail to see the challenges which remain for them.
Some people have positioned themselves as experts with the little training they had, and now maintain the new status quo which isn’t much better than the original one.
The tolerance of the microagressions and harm that individuals cause is lower, whilst expectations on leaders, EDI practitioners and early adopters is much higher. This disconnect leads to break downs and harm.
Training was never designed to fix your problem
The training was only ever designed to introduce you to a topic and teach you something. You were meant to do something with it afterwards, and probably didn’t.
There was no accountability woven into the training offer
If organisations assumed that the training was going to fix the problem, they probably didn’t create a system of identifying what the benefits of the training were, how it was used by individuals and departments, and what the impact was.
By not implementing these evaluation systems and processes, we let people off the hook to continue or revert to their normal behaviours, some of which may be exclusionary.
Accountability can look like:
People making a note of three ways they will use the training at work
Weaving these actions into appraisals or annual reviews
Asking department leaders to hold a meeting following the training with their teams to collaborate on how they would use it, and integrate these into department plans and performance indicators
Leaders embedding the training outcomes into business plans.
Reviewing the impact of the training quarterly through surveys or focus groups
If you’re considering implementing some training or learning on inclusion topics, you can get in touch with us here, and we will work with you to create a package which meets your needs.