For diversity and inclusion training to stick, it needs support, reinforcement and a firm foundation in a broader talent management strategy that includes culture, leadership and learning and development.

Ask these questions: Does our culture embrace diversity and inclusion? Do our leaders understand their value to the business and the workforce? Do the organization’s talent management strategies and systems support and enable diversity and inclusion? If not, training would be precipitous because the right support for this type of development is not there.

Writing is the process of discovery, so, you don’t have to have all your ideas fully formed before you write (an outline is good but you may not know exactly what you want to write). As you write, it will clarify your ideas. Don’t wait for the perfect word or phrase, just write and it will morph into something that you like. Don’t wait for something that you like before you write it down, just write.

If employees complete their work on time, and if they do a quality job, then location shouldn’t matter.

There is a big difference between “going to work” and “getting to work.” Of the two, only “getting to work” creates value. Managers should focus on improving the quality of the work and the efficiency of completion, rather than juggling the logistics of employee location.

Instead of only typical multiple choice questions, try mini-scenarios. Write a few sentences to set a scenario with a problem. A customer voices an objection, software displays an error message, or an employee asks a manager for help. Next, ask learners which action or response they would choose. Now you have a one-question decision-making scenario rather than just an abstract comprehension question. You can do this with any tool, and it creates a more interesting practice or assessment to engage learners.

“Telling people they’re racist, sexist, and xenophobic is going to get you exactly nowhere,” said Alana Conner, executive director of Stanford University’s Social Psychological Answers to Real-World Questions Center. “It’s such a threatening message. One of the things we know from social psychology is when people feel threatened, they can’t change, they can’t listen.”

In <a href="https://perception.org/publications/science-of-equality-vol-1/"><em>The Science of Equality</em></a>, Godsil and her co-authors proposed several tactics that seem, based on the research, promising: presenting people with examples that break stereotypes, asking them to think about people of color as individuals rather than as a group, tasking them with taking on first-person perspectives of people of color, and increasing contact between people of different races. All of these interventions appear to reduce subconscious racial biases, while interracial contact appears most promising for reducing racial anxiety more broadly.

Godsil and her team also put forward tactics that can help people limit actions based on racial biases, such as getting people to slow down in their decision-making and teaching them about how subconscious processes can influence their impulses — even on issues unrelated to race — in order to push them to question their own objectivity. The research suggests these ideas have potential, but they generally seem to require that people are genuinely willing to reduce their biased behavior and actions.