To Ask if your workplace has ever held diversity and inclusion training?

Yes, annually online. It’s biased, inaccurate and a complete time-sink.

@Ponderingwindow my friend at work (who has a disability) moans every time we're required to do it.

Have done for years, now it is an online course.

Mandatory online training with a test. I don’t find it useful. I pass the test, but the questions frustrate me because they are imprecise. They are vague and do not clarify all the important sub-questions that occur to a NT brain.

So basically, the diversity training feels like it is discriminating against me.

Council. Online e-sessions. Absolutely a tick box exercise, primary school level stuff.

Equality and diversity ‘training’ online. It was a complete joke. Took 20 minutes max, multiple choice questions, 3 answers, and if you got it wrong there was a cheery, ‘Not quite right, try again!’

But never mind, we were all ‘trained’. Every single council employee was required to do it - it was provided by some outside agency and God only knows what it cost our permanently poverty-pleading council.

A tick-box exercise par excellence.

It was like this but there's been a noticeable quietening down over the last two years. And the change in approach around disagreeing respectfully makes me wonder if there's been some activity behind the scenes to push back on some of the original training, given the various tribunal and court cases. Hopefully other workplaces will follow suit and get there. I am convinced one of our more senior people is in a SEEN network, which could explain the change of approach.

I've recently done it as a full day in person training from someone in-house and it was actually pretty good. Talked about all protected characteristics, people talked about their own experiences etc. Using an example video of someone intervening in a situation where someone was being racially abused in public there was a bit about how we could support someone or deescalate a situation. Discussion about assumptions we can make about people. I csn see how a crappy e-learning course could be useless though.

I've had two. One attempted to combat racism by forcing people to be racist.

The other was about allyship but was really a trans PR exercise with irrelevant content from the US. Also they mentioned TERF without indicating that it's a slur and should not be used.

Both terrible.

Worked for a large US company. We didn't have any.

I work for a large but not huge international company. Last year we had an American man with a beard in charge of training who pushed out diversity training that was 90% gender identity and was very proud of it. Big push from him for everyone to use pronouns etc.

I had a quiet but firm word with my (top table management) boss pointing out things including the absolute state of our “gender” pay gap statutory reporting, how women returning from Mat leave were being treated, how our premises were very inaccessible to physical disabilities oh and how they were creating legal employment risk in the U.K given gender critical beliefs being protected. I suspect other people did similar. And we aren’t in a line of business where being a pioneer on trans acceptance above other things is highly important.

Anyway Beardy man left shortly afterwards. Now we have just had broader but highly generic DEI online training. It’s still not right on gender identity but I’ve let it go. oh and the number of people with pronouns on email signature has almost vanished.

Yes. It was good too

Yes, as has been said, just a box ticking exercise.

Same as Unconscious Bias training. i was the person that spoke up and questioned why he was telling me how i felt about a certain situation was wrong, and that made other people speak up too.

Yes, I work in a school and ours was really interesting. They talked about Child Q and how unconscious bias from school staff and external agencies we refer to can affect children's experience of education and lead to safeguarding failures. The trainer was of mixed-heritage and talked about the discrimination and assumptions he'd faced as someone who had been promoted to a Leadership position in schools. Feedback from staff was very positive.

Yep, and i make a point of not attending.

I won't listen to ideological bullshit.

Mandatory in every workplace I've been in. I dont think it teaches anyone anything they don't know and isn't that helpful at intersectionality I.e if someone is a gay man from a Muslim background, exposing the bias from multiple groups to that person.

We had it in our place but it just focused on trans women strangely. Not the whole picture.

One was held on the 3rd floor. No lift.

The other was presented by a woman who believed that because exceptional athletes can run with a guide or propel their racing chairs for a marathon, that meant Disableds (her word) were all gold medal winners and they were really grateful that Normal People clapped them at the paralympics. She didn't appreciate me pointing out that some Disabled people found that 'aww, look, didn't they do well? Aren't they trying so hard to be like us?' and 'look, inspirational cripples - why are you moaning about access when you could be an Olympic gold medallist if you tried?' rhetoric incredibly patronising. A full on bollocking about my prejudices ensued.

And then I climbed over the tables she'd pushed around to completely block my exit, retrieved my crutch from behind her stuff where she'd slung it at the back of the room without asking if it belonged to anybody, trashed the loose papers she'd dumped on the floor as my crutch slipped on them, got a coffee from behind where she'd dumped her cases directly in front of the table with the urn (I might have spilled some very hot coffee over her case in the process), turned around and climbed back over the table to return to my seat.

She wouldn't even look at me for the rest of the session and the guy in charge (who was apparently trying not to keel over for laughing at how I was reacting, along with my buddy who had been dying a thousand deaths waiting to see how I was going to respond) apologised profusely afterwards and promised me she was never going to be booked for anything ever again.

It's a pile of wank that makes some people a shitload of money.

It is compulsory at my work for all new members of staff. We also have to have regular updates, I think ever few years ( I think I last did mine a couple of years ago)

I have been in my job for many years so have done the training fave to face in the past but it is all online now
We are a university though

I have just completed a course tackling racial discrimination and bias and it was extremely good.

Yes, NHS online mandatory training and it is neither diverse, equal or inclusive. And it misrepresents the Equality Act. And they won't change it, so thousands of NHS staff are getting 'trained' that the law is what Stonewall would like it to be, rather than the actual law. Great use of time and money.

Are you sure you weren't watching an episode of Father Ted?

We had one at work that was really good, run by facilitators whose focus was 'this is a space for you to ask questions that you have that you might feel like you'd get into trouble for in real life' (paraphrasing) and then led a session that talked about how we all have our own challenges, but some people have additional challenges due to race/sexuality/gender/disability/background etc. The big problems in our organisation are that a lot of the working class white men get very angry about the word privilege, and this actually sat people down and explained what that word meant in the context they were hearing it properly. They even talked about how it's important to ask questions (in the right environment) and do research etc if you hear something to do with equality that makes you think 'what a load of bollocks', how it's okay not to understand but important to try and educate yourself and be open to listening, it's okay to disagree as long as you don't let it affect the way you treat others. One person on our cohort took the time to then go 'and sometimes you need to understand that expressing certain views at work can make people wary of you because of X experiences in their past" and talked about a past experience they had, which opened a few eyes.
I liked the fact that they did some 'mythbusting' and then opened the floor for questions (the one about diversity hiring was great) and it really opened my eyes to how some people just repeat what they hear from others, and not do their own research on things, for whatever reason, and reaffirmed my belief that while people might think things like this are 'patronising', I think it's actually more patronising to assume everyone has the same level of understanding!
We had some great questions from people, my only critique is that it was a few hours and I think an all day event or even two days would have really put people at ease. We did have one guy who just didn't want to hear it though, he wanted to express an opinion and be heard, but just wasn't interested in listening and learning on the topic he felt so strongly about. And I don't mean he heard what people had to say and still didn't agree, he just simply ignored then and repeated himself, even if someone was explaining facts and figures that disproved what he said - he just wasn't interested, he wanted to believe what he did (which was that pushing for in organisations was a waste of time because people just hire the best person for the job) despite evidence to the contrary. Which I found very frustrating - I'm happy to have an opposing view to someone, but at least have evidence to back that view up, of which he had none.

Oh god yes, we have masses of mandatory company trainings - online, where you click through and then have to pass a little test at the end. Usually they are American made, using cartoon characters, annoying voices and completely bloody obvious multi choice questions - tick box exercise and annoying waste of time.

Delivered as online training where I work.

Fortunately there is a context menu you can access and speed up the presentation, so completed it in 5 minutes, then I could get back to actually earning the division money.

Those that did sit through it, thought it was a presentation of the obvious and a waste of time.