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

All the time. I’m lucky to work for an organisation with a very diverse workforce from an ethnic, cultural and ability standpoint where most of our senior leaders are women. I don’t find the yearly EDI training teaches me much now but we’ve had some really interesting sessions over the last few years of Neurodiversity which have certainly opened my eyes.

E-learning, some of which is useful, some just box ticking.There was one on reasonable adjustments which was interesting.

With all e-learning you get out what you put in interest wise. Most people do the bare minimum.

An ethos of good behaviour from everyone helps.

No. We are a small private company, 14 people in the UK. We are a diverse team and work well together.

I've not seen any reason for it yet.

DH is a diversity and inclusion officer at his place of work. He has chosen to focus on disability and ND and is trying very hard to get more disabled people into the company. It’s a STEM organisation and already multicultural with lots of women at the top.

Our workplace does, in the form of a series of videos. It’s just a box ticking exercise as management don’t adhere to it at all.

Yes (law firms).

First firm was likely down to the fact that the CEO kept having grievances raised against him due to disliking women and older people.

Another firm had mandatory video training on induction with an audit trail to check you’d watched all of the videos. Their video on transgender training was… something special

Anyway, there’s a reason they do it. It’s to attempt to discharge company liability if one employee discriminates against another and a Tribunal claim is brought. “We did everything possible to prevent it, therefore we can’t be liable” and evidencing training goes some way towards helping that argument.

Yes, we have to do it annually. Local government. The problem is it states that gender is a protected characteristic and doesn’t once refer to sex, or discrimination against women. One of the scenarios is a man wants to use the women’s changing room at the swimming pool and the correct answer is that he should be allowed to do so.

Completely agree with those pp who've said that unconscious bias training is very good/eye-opening. I did this at my workplace a couple of years ago and learned a lot. I've said that it should be mandatory for recruiting managers but of course it isn't....

It’s mostly done as a corporate ass covering exercise. If a D&I case comes about, the company can then fire the perpetrator quickly and not be sued as it can say ‘sorry, they were acting outside of our policy, their actions didn’t represent our policy’.

Yes, and it's all a load of shit I'd rather not do.

Worked in Adult Ed we could not log on to do any work until online training was completed.It was a right pain in the bum.

Also work in a university and have to complete this and a number of other online courses annually which ends up being a tick box exercise as you only get a month when you are "due" to complete all 7+ training courses before names go to senior staff for follow up and mine has ended up being in our busiest time of year due to when they moved to this model, so it's just a case of getting it done, passed and onto the next one.

Like others have said, it'd be better if it were delivered in person and specific to higher education (where EDI is clearly important!) rather than some outsourced general online product with the uni branding, and you could do it at a time when you had time in your workload rather than being forced to do it at a random point dictated by a computer.

I've done many over the years and often find they are biased so out of 4 people one stands put obviously so you can pick that person as the diversity person. In reality they may be well looked after but another of the 4 actually is in need of support. Like others have said it rarely looks at females.

I also find it can be very "one size fits all" assuming you all work in an office. I am a lone worker and I do not have the luxury of easily accessing my manager. I speak with her once a week I can't just have a quick chat. I would like diversity to look at wider roles too

Me too. Another pointless waste of money.

We've had some really good training in this space with actors around microagressions. It focused on all types of diversity and really made me think

It’s part of our mandatory training…it’s an online module…takes about 5 mins to do

Yes but it focussed alnost entirely on transwomen with the odd bit thrown in about gay people. A comment was made about Jews and the Holocaust (as in it would be not nice to mention) but someone complained about the fact every time the word ‘Jew’ is mentioned ‘Holocaust’ is spoken in the same breath. The training is now cancelled and is being ‘remodelled’ for the future.

Yes it was full of nonsense

When challenged, (sex is determined in utero) she said "we'll have to agree to disagree".

Yes seemed a waste of time in both companies I did it in neither where in offices that could ever accommodate physically challenged people, one was such a toxic environment they just referred to EDI as a joke and another way to take the micky out of people. To be honest the course probably highlighted how bad the work environment was even more. It was just a tick box exercise for both companies nothing ever changed.

Yup. Felt like a tick box exercise. Nothing outside of common sense.

The "main" EDI training was bland and not very useful. It was all a bit obvious (unless you're a bigot, in which case you wouldn't be paying attention anyway). I attended a separate session on unconscious bias which I found a lot more valuable.

No. We're a tiny 100% female group and work with a racially diverse group of children. Never anything official. I think we should have further training.

Few different things available, but didn’t really answer any questions or enable me to do my role better so it was a useless tick box as far as I’m concerned.
My role requires me to be quite on the ball where EDI is considered so the basics were no help to me, as I knew them, and the training wasn’t equipped to handle anything more.

We do a lot of training in my charity/ advice sector and EDI is central. I created a session on neurodiversity recently to present to the organisation. We have lots of training in equity, disability awareness, discrimination. In the work we do it is essential, we are expected to be advocates for people experiencing discrimination and exclusion and need to understand what that means.

We don't. The area we live and work in is predominantly white British, and although lots of our employees move here from around the country and we have staff from lots of different countries, from the outside we may not look diverse. What we do have is an extremely close knit and supportive company, who looks after all of its employees equally and with respect. And that applies between the staff too - we're very lucky. We have a few disabled staff, have had several gay marriages between staff that have met at work and make sure everyone's religions (or lack of) are equally catered for. Sometimes, you don't need a box ticking exercise - just decent people who just view everyone as people.