Diversity in the Workplace is a current, and growing, topic of conversation for HR departments. Providing training for staff has many potential benefits for your company:
  • Increasing productivity by lowering intra-staff tensions.
  • Potentially increasing the company’s creative ability to solve issues through the increasing variety of employees and their varying backgrounds.
  • Providing documentation of diversity training to help prevent potential discrimination claims.
No matter what kinds of training you bring in-house, the follow-up is very important. Trainees of any kind of training typically forget over 80% of the lessons within 30 days. Here are a couple tips for what the follow-up should look like after the training to add diversity in the workplace:

Leadership must help to illustrate how important diversity is to the company.


When subordinates return from training, leadership should make it a point to ask them about the training and how it could apply to their daily routines. By engaging the recently trained employees and asking about how they will use their training, leadership can help to get more value from the investment in the diversity training. Actually implementing and integrating the diversity best-practices is the only way to make the needed changes happen inside the company.

Set measurable goals to see if there really is an increasing rate of diversity in the workplace.


Setting and monitoring measurable goals is a great way to continue to show how important diversity is to the company. Long term rates of discrimination claims (and losses) are one way to measure, but typically too long term to be effective with the daily operations. Shorter-term goals can be set around rates of hiring for people of color and protected classes.

As a business owner, it’s important to understand that training, by itself, doesn’t change the company culture. The steps and routines that follow the training are the important elements that can get the training topics to “stick”.

Modern Business Associates is an HR company that focuses on payroll and HR outsourcing. We routinely work with clients on HR services and Benefits in Tampa, FL. As a Professional Payroll and HR outsource organization, our clients rely on us to help them effectively deal with these kinds of topics.