In this episode, Jamey dives into the landscape of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) trainings, focusing on two common pitfalls organizations encounter when implementing DEI education. Jamey emphasizes that while education should be a foundational component of any effective DEI strategy, it is often mistakenly used as a one-size-fits-all solution. The episode highlights the importance of integrating education within a broader strategy that also addresses policies, procedures, and behaviors, rather than relying solely on training sessions to create real change.

Jamey also critiques the common practice of delivering mass, all-staff DEI trainings, arguing that these large group settings often hinder meaningful engagement, vulnerability, and participation. Instead, Jamey recommends a more intentional and tiered approach, such as delivering training in smaller groups and prioritizing leaders’ participation first. This method not only boosts the effectiveness of the trainings but also underscores DEI as an organizational priority and allows for a more tailored, impactful experience. The episode wraps up with actionable advice on making DEI education a more participatory and strategic part of organizational growth—reminding listeners that effective DEI work is multi-faceted and ongoing.

To find out more, visit: www.Equity-At-Work.com

Key Topics Discussed:

• The necessity of DEI education as part of a comprehensive DEI strategy
• The misconception of training as the sole solution to DEI challenges
• Drawbacks of conducting large, all-staff DEI trainings
• The benefits of small group training sessions for engagement and vulnerability
• Importance of sequential, tiered training (starting with leaders)
• Integrating education with policy and procedure changes
• Creating intentional groupings for maximum training impact
• Using education to facilitate genuine discussion, reflection, and organizational change
• Emphasizing DEI as an organizational, not merely individual, priority

I'm Jamie Applegate, senior director of DEI at Equity at Work, and this is your DEI Minute, your go to podcast for leaders looking to navigate the ever evolving landscape of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace. Whether you're just starting out with DEI or looking to sustain your long term successes, each episode will provide you with the actions you can take to move DEI forward at your organization, all in fifteen minutes or less. Join us every other week as we break through the noise and help you do DEI right. Let's get to it. So today, I wanna talk about DEI trainings, specifically two common mistakes that organizations make when they are implementing DEI trainings or DEI education. I'm gonna start off by saying, DEI education should be a component of any successful DEI strategy in having folks, team members engage with new ideas, engage with each other, learn from each other, learn about each other, learn about the world around them, and just engage with new ideas is super important for building connection and having folks engage with each other. I also wanna preface this with DEI education should not be about telling people what to believe. People have every right to believe what they would like to believe.

They have every right to believe what they want. And outside of the workplace, they can engage with those ideas, hopefully, in ways that are legal and appropriate, but they have every right to believe that really when we do DEI education, it's about learning opportunities and then setting behavioral expectations. But again, education should absolutely be a core component of any overall DEI strategy. It usually is. People focus on it. They build in trainings, and those are great. But I wanna talk today about a couple sort of missteps that folks typically make. Number one is, thinking that training is the only solution to a given problem.

So if something is going wrong, if maybe something that might be happening is that if managers or if you're having, like, a generation gap. So if folks of different generations are struggling to engage with each other, maybe what we say we wanna do is a training about different generations and, you know, common perceptions of different generations and how to sort of work across generation lines. And that can be helpful, but might not actually be the thing that needs to happen immediately. And then another one is thinking that training everyone all at once, all together, whole staff, everyone all at the same time is the best because it's the most time and resource efficient. And so I wanna talk about why those two things especially are common missteps we see and suggestions we would make for, and recommendations we would have for how to avoid those things. So but first, I wanna talk about why those things don't work. So for training as the only solution to a given problem, it is too narrow a focus and it does not place education within a larger DEI strategy. So not every problem is an education problem.

Some are policy problems, some are procedure problems, some are behavior problems, and some are people problems. Those should be resolved through adjustments to those types of things. So if there's a policy problem, there might be an education component, but you need to fix the policy. If there's a procedure problem, sure, sure, you might need to educate people about what the new procedure is, but you also need to fix the procedure. If there's a behavior problem, sure, education can be a component, but you also need to just set new behavioral expectations. So we really wanna make sure that we are looking at a larger, through a larger lens around what DEI is and not saying that DEI is only education. For training everyone all at once, I understand why folks do that. It is obviously if we just say we're gonna train everyone all at once, it's efficient in terms of time, resources.

If you're hiring an external facilitator or bringing in an external speaker, it's easier to have them just do one session and have everyone there than try to bring them back multiple times. It also is probably more resource effective in terms of cost. It's probably a little cheaper. So there are certainly some and there are also some trainings maybe that you could do in large groups, but the problem is that the vast majority of trainings are going to be most effective in small groups. So most trainings, if you do them in small groups, it allows for more engagement and participation. You can do more activities. It's less sitting and listening, and you can have folks share out. It also allows more space for discussion and questions.

You're not asking so a hundred people if you're doing a training with a hundred people, all of them might have a question or wanna follow-up. But if you only have time for, like, three folks to share, they're gonna be competing for those opportunities to ask those questions. Also, smaller groups allows more space for vulnerability. If you're in a group of, like, 10 or 20 people who maybe you work with more directly or you know a little better, you're probably more likely to share your own thoughts, your own, feelings. If you've had a really challenging moment that you wanna talk about, you might feel more comfortable sharing. If you're in a group of a hundred people, that can be pretty scary. And so you're probably not gonna wanna share all about yourself in a massive room full of tons of people. So it really sort of shuts down vulnerability and participation.

And then also, as a side note for a facilitator, talking to a group of a hundred people, you're not really gonna be able to be accountable for whether or not anyone absorbed that information. With a group of like 20, no one can hide. No one can sit in the back and be on their computer and kinda zone out or work on other things. But in a group of a hundred, they definitely can, and they are. And so those large groups tend to be just less effective. So, training also, when we're doing it sort of all at once, another issue is that it means that all people in the organization are getting the same information at the exact same time when actually what we need to do is make sure that the people who we need to be able to track who needs the information first. So commonly when it's DEI topics, we want leaders to go through the trainings first. It allows them to gay engage with the new ideas first, both just they're gonna grapple with it for themselves.

What is this new information? How does it, you know, hit me? How does it sit with me? What does it mean for me as a person? And then also it allows them to grapple with it as a leader. How might my team take this new information? What new learning might they take from it? What support might they need as we go through this new process, new policy? So we really wanna make sure that we do a tiered approach, and it also allows leaders to model the investment of time and energy. So it shows that, look, we went through it too. I'm telling you to go through this training, to go to this training. I already went through it. Here's what I found valuable. I'm excited to talk to you about what you find valuable. And it also validates DEI as an organizational priority.

So it shows, look, every single person, the leaders took the time out of their busy schedules to go to this training. So then lower down workers on the hierarchy might also say themselves, well, if my boss also went through it, then it it must be important, so I'm gonna go do it too. It also finally, you know, avoiding having everyone come all at once, having tiered, phases for implementation of trainings, it allows facilitators and session designers to identify what dynamic is most important for a given session. So who should be in the sessions together? Should entire departments be together? Should it be people who work on specific type of task? Should it be technical versus nontechnical staff? Should it be everyone who manages other people? What is needed for this training to be most impactful and who needs to be in the room together to get that out, of the training? That's where we wanna look at when those things we don't wanna just do it all at once because then everyone's coming in in their own little silo, in their own little world, and we can't really control for how we engage the discussion. We can't customize the training to best fit the audience. It's just kind of one size fits all, which as we know means one size doesn't fit anyone truly perfectly. So, again, we wanna avoid the missteps of seeing training as the only solution. Training can be definitely a core component of a series of solutions or part of the solution, but it shouldn't be thought of as the only thing or as the absolute only way that we can address any sort of problem, especially in the DEI world.

And also, we wanna avoid doing things where we do all staff trainings all at once altogether. We wanna make sure that it is customized to various audience groups to be most impactful and gives, people space to really grapple with the new ideas or new policies or new processes that they might be learning about. So a couple of things we do, we encourage trainings to be a core part of a larger DEI strategy, but not the sole effort. This includes doing things like policy reviews, doing changes to procedures, looking at practice, and also just looking at individual behaviors. Do people know how to engage with each other successfully? That can be education, but that can also be coaching. That can also be and that that coaching can be one on one. Also we wanna place education as important when paired with discussion and reflection for how it impacts individuals and teams. So we don't wanna do education where folks are just sitting there, all receiving the same information, then we just say, thank you so much.

Have a great rest of the day. No. Education should be, hearing something new and then engaging with it in a group setting or with your teammates, having that time to sort of digest it communally and in a group. And then finally, we wanna implement education in tiers with very intentional groupings. So again, what kind of dynamic are we looking for in this training? Who needs this information first? A really, really, really common thing that happens is that everyone gets all the information all at once and then direct reports go to their supervisor and say, what am I supposed to do with this? And the supervisor themselves is thinking, I don't know how to handle this information first, I need space and time. And so we wanna make sure we're setting everyone up for success. So we gotta think about what is the most effective rollout of the of the information that sets the team up for the most impact and success long term. When you do this, you get better experience and trainings.

Smaller groups are more engaging and more fun. People get more individual attention. If they have a question, they're more able to ask it. They're not competing with a hundred other people to ask a question. You get more participation and you get better retention of the topics covered. Folks are more tuned in when they know that they're not sort of anonymous and you know that there's gonna be participation. Also, saying that training is not the sole thing we do, it means that it's a more cohesive DEI strategy. It uses education as a foundation, but not the entire focus.

It also builds in other activities and other things that are important. Things like policy reviews, things like employee resource groups, things like connection spaces, things like community service and philanthropy. All those things are really, really critical as parts of a DEI strategy. It can't just be education alone. And then finally, making sure that trainings are part of the strategy about the whole thing means we have a better experience with DEI overall. We can use education as a way to build engagement and support for DEI initiatives overall. So education, again, it should be an absolutely core component of any DEI strategy, but it cannot be the be all end all of your DEI strategy. You have to build in other pieces as well.

And also, if you're gonna do DEI education, make sure you do it in a way that actually encourages participation and engagement and not in ways that you're just checking the box to say, oh, we did this. So good luck, and go get that DEI education. Thanks so much. That's a wrap. I'm Jamie Applegate, and that's your DEI Minute for today. Thank you for listening. Please be sure to follow us wherever you listen to podcasts, and don't forget to leave us a review. If you ever have questions, please visit our website or send us an email.

You can also sign up for our newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram. Links to everything can be found found in the episode notes. This episode was edited and produced by Potgrove with podcast art by me, Jamie Upkin.