Inclusion and Diversity Training: Bridging the generation gap
Have you ever heard of inclusion and diversity training and how it can help you to bridge the generation gap in your business? The purpose of diversity training is to increase participants’ awareness of miscellaneous types of diversity and how to appreciate them. The main learnings of the training are to provide participants with knowledge and strategies to enhance interpersonal and communication skills across diversity to help build a healthy and well-functioning work environment.
Inclusion and diversity training is among the most effective ways to ensure that your company is attracting enough individuals from diverse backgrounds, ethnicities, and genders. This training is also efficacious in bridging the generation gap across your team members. By providing diversity training for your employees and managers, you will help them to develop the skills they need to facilitate working with diverse groups.
For instance, when CEOs or managing directors aim to put together a diverse and talented workforce, one of the frequently overlooked challenges is bridging the age gap between members - key to creating well-performing teams. Employing people with different characteristics can be fairly simple; however, managing them in order to successfully build a well-functioning team is a much more complex process. Thus, inclusivity and diversity training will provide your business with the essential knowledge and guidance on how you should approach certain challenges and effectively overcome them.
Diversity training will bring clarity to your colleagues and enable them to better establish a strong and healthy relationship with each other, regardless of their differences. More importantly, they will get a chance to learn how to leverage and benefit from these unique differences and each other’s experiences.
Diversity training for diverse generations
In today's workplace, five different generations coexist, with the three most dominant being the "Millennials'', "Baby Boomers", and "Generation X.". In case you are not familiar with these generations' key characteristics, please see our brief description of them below:
Millennials (1981-1996) are often characterised as tech-savvy, curious, transparent, and collaborative. This generation tends to highly value straightforward management, and recognition and are more attracted to positions that offer work-life balance, flexibility, and career advancement opportunities.
The Baby Boomers (1946-1964) generation is described to have strong work ethics, being disciplined, highly competitive, and self-sufficient. They value workplace visibility and equate authority with experience.
Generation X (1965-1976), just like Millenials, appreciates work-life balance, is technologically adaptive, and is self-sufficient. This generation tends to be highly adaptive, flexible, calm, and resilient.
Generation Z (1997-2015) is known as the digital native generation who were born into a world where technology was prevalent, and as a generation who live the moment but also have great interest in ethical and SDGs in society and organisations. They tend to be more attracted to a workplace where they can not only have a work-life balance but additionally choose where, when, and how to work. More importantly they are attentive towards respect for diversity in the workplace.
Even though they share certain similarities, it is essential to equally recognise and accept the importance of these differences in creating a well-functioning and high-performing team. Naturally, this brings us to the question, how you should initiate bridging the generational gap amongst your team members? Put simply, there is no one straightforward solution to it. However, with inclusion and diversity training, you will be able to introduce essential changes into your company culture to create an ideal environment for everyone.
Avoid stereotyping
As mentioned in one of our earlier blogs, “Be conscious of unconscious biases at your workplace“, age discrimination is another example of unconscious bias. For instance, with regard to technology, we can often hold stereotypes that older generations are clueless and incapable of learning new tech-related skills. On the other hand, our society tends to assume that younger generations are irresponsible and lack knowledge. Assuming that someone knows less than you because they don’t share the same experience can cause unpleasant and unnecessary issues between colleagues. Such stereotypes can significantly influence how team members communicate and collaborate with each other. Diversity training will allow your employees to understand and appreciate the differences between various generations, as well as see beyond them.
The training will show you how to handle cases of unconscious biases that include stereotyping and equally support your business leaders and its members to address these matters. Being committed to ensure equity and equality at your company through diversity training will help your employees to avoid stereotyping, and will significantly improve the culture of internal communications.
Benefit from having a diverse team!
Moreover, diversity training will help you recognise the differences between individuals from various age groups, and how your business can benefit from them. Understanding what drives other generations’ productivity will help you to gain better recognition of how your employees prefer to work. Essentially it will allow you to bridge the generational divide in your workplace. Age is a variable to determine each generation's common behaviours, attitudes, outlooks, and needs. Therefore, diversity training will teach you how to effectively communicate with your colleagues and will allow you to better understand how to benefit from having diverse employees.
Bring the clarity to your team through diversity training
Even though managing a diverse team might seem like a challenging matter, with tailored diversity training it can be a straightforward process. Ensuring diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace is an essential element to create an ideal environment where employees can truly expand and utilise their potential. Therefore, providing diversity training for your team leaders is an effective way to implement essential practices into your work culture and will enable you to create inclusive and well-performing teams.
Our bespoke diversity training will clarify the benefits of ensuring clear and healthy communication between diverse team members. We provide lectures and training on a wide variety of topics, including why diversity and inclusion are important for management roles. Our diversity training will help you bring more diversity and inclusion into your management and cultivate a diverse workforce all in alignment with your organisation's culture, size, and industry. Get in touch with one of our experts to find out more about how diversity training can significantly improve your company's performance.
