Higher Education Institution

Designing and Implementing 1st Enterprise-wide DEI Education Offerings

Duration: 15 months

Situation/Challenges:

DEI learning offerings were available across the university but were housed in various departments and mostly geared toward educators and students. There were not yet any centralized and standardized offerings specifically for university staff. Some of the main goals were to create a learning program that:

• Was applicable to both leaders and individual contributors

• Aligned with and built on existing leadership competencies and expectations

• Closed gaps in employee experience and maximized learning opportunities in specific DEI topics (Leading Inclusive Teams, Understanding Unconcious Bias), which were identified and prioritized based on an employee engagement survey administered by the university 

• Could eventually be rolled out to 3,000+ staff members

Approach:

• Partnered with other expert consultants and invested internal leaders (a real dream team!)

• Built relationships and worked cross-functionally with an advisory council made up of leaders across the university and HR team to galvanize program support, collaborate on DEI efforts, and ensure alignment with university-wide development goals

The Work:

• Utilized internal data and external benchmarking to finalize a DEI training strategy and measurement approach

• Built and managed project plan for the creation of the new offerings

• Designed and facilitated experiential training sessions aimed at building awareness and greater fluency in leading inclusive teams and mitigating the impact of implicit bias in sustainable and accountable ways

• Tracked feedback, impact measurement, and program improvement

• Contributed to creating an enrollment communication strategy and a program scaling strategy to roll out to 3,000+ staff 

• Co-developed a learning methodology to train new facilitators (Train the Trainer) to deliver workshop materials and served as instructor and mentor

• In response to the work-from-home orders of COVID-19, rapidly redesigned in-person learning offerings to be interactive online offerings without a dip in participant experience scores

Key Outcomes:

• Average participant experience score of 4.8 out of 5

• # of leaders who went through the program’s initial run

• 6 internal facilitators trained to deliver the material to help scale delivery

• DEI Learning strategy that aligned with overall staff DEI strategy