Studies show that diversity is an asset that brings many benefits to organisations. Benefits include improved innovation and collaboration, increased customer and staff satisfaction, improved employee performance, and stronger staff attraction and retention. This requires good leadership, a psychologically safe work culture, and people who genuinely want to develop themselves, participate and see more of the good than the bad.
Promoting diversity promotes social justice. It helps prevent discrimination and promotes inclusiveness. Promoting diversity is also a requirement of legislation. For example, the Non-Discrimination Act prohibits discrimination against anyone based on age, origin, nationality, language, opinion, political activity, religion, belief, family relations, health status, disability, sexual orientation or other personal factors.
EDIFY-EDU project promotes EDI in organisations through training
Today’s working life is in the throes of constant change. Therefore, it is important for the individual to develop their competences, share ideas with the work community and develop the company’s operations together with the rest of the personnel towards the goals. The work community today can be very diverse, so it is good to develop an understanding of equality, diversity and inclusion through education.
Training started with a MOOC course, open to all interested in EDI themes. The course included the most important basic concepts and starting points. Key themes were:
- 1) Fostering inclusive and emotionally intelligent workplaces;
- 2) Implementing comprehensive diversity and inclusion strategies;
- 3) Promoting digital inclusion and etiquette in the workplace;
- 4) Integrating key competence frameworks for enhanced EDI practices;
- 5) Understanding legal and regulatory frameworks for EDI and digital practices;
- 6) Building ethical, educated and legal work environments.
By passing these MOOC themes students received Digital Open Badges, which make it easy to verify competences by sharing them via different channels, for example as a LinkedIn certificate. If all six themes were passed, a Golden Badge was earned.
Figure 1: The owner of the “Full Course” Golden Open Badge has accessed all learning materials in all Modules and has successfully attempted all quizzes. This is Badge for all 6 Sections of the MOOC (20 modules in total)!
Diversity is an Opportunity
It is worth considering how diversity best fits into one’s own organisation, whether one could adopt diversity as one of the strategic goals and activities, what added value it would bring to leadership and the whole organisation, not forgetting the customer who is always affected in the end.
”How we see inclusion, that is the feeling of belonging”, Akira Ahola
If you are more interested in the topic, check the EDIFY-EDU project’s YouTube channel! You find ideas, tools and practical concreteness on the subject.
