In our university, all new members of staff are required to attend a 3-hour training session on equality and diversity. I couldn’t agree more that these are excellent and valuable principles in any workplace, but, in all honesty, who would be happy to sit in a room for 3 hours listening to policies and rules that are mostly common sense anyway?
A novel idea
If employees are required to spend a whole afternoon attending that kind of training, they might as well have some fun doing it. I’m sure someone has had this thought before.
With this in mind, the university took a whole new approach on equality and diversity training, bringing actors on campus to impersonate real situations that can happen in any workplace. These have to do with all sorts of uncomfortable situations including peer bullying, sexual and racial discrimination, autarchic management, prejudice, etc. Staff members were asked to sit through a number of short acts each representing different workplace situations. Each act was followed by an open discussion, where we were asked to give our opinions and possibly suggest ways of challenging problematic behaviours like those we just watched.
Was it fun?
Yes! For several reasons:
- A very innovative training model – none of the attendees had done anything like that before.
- Audience participation was encouraged and expected – and on several occasions audience suggestions were used to replace the original script.
- We felt like we were included in the action and were given the “power” to make changes and recommendations.
- Who wouldn’t enjoy a free theatre performance on an afternoon that they would otherwise spend working?
Was it useful?
Yes! The reasons for this are quite obvious:
- Diversity and equality are indeed key priorities in any workplace and all members of staff need to be aware of the relevant policies. Instead of filling our heads with useless details, we were presented with situations we had seen, or were able to see, ourselves in.
- By watching the acts we were able to see the practical implications of specific behaviours within the workplace.
- We were engaged in discussion among ourselves and with the actors, and a lot of useful conclusions were drawn out of this.
- At the end of the day, we had started contemplating our own behaviour in the workplace and challenging ourselves.
And that, I think, was the most important lesson we learned that afternoon.
