How to put interactivity and personalization at the heart of your DEI compliance training

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) matter. That’s always been the case, but the past decade has seen a rise in DEI’s prominence—and, from a content authoring standpoint, that’s a big deal. It’s not enough for DEI courses to meet compliance requirements—they need to go beyond the minimum and contribute meaningfully to a culture of representation, fairness, and equal opportunity. 

You’ve got plenty of incentives to go the extra mile in your DEI efforts. Not only is a diverse and inclusive environment a moral victory, but it comes with some pretty tangible benefits, too. Organizations with sustainable DEI programs enjoy a 20% rise in inclusion—which corresponds to a range of advantages, including intent to stay and higher employee performance. McKinsey data points to that kind of advantage in research documenting a clear upward trend in financial outperformance among organizations with gender-diverse executive teams.

When good DEI practices offer an array of handy outcomes, one thing’s clear: your authoring tool has to provide more than a slideshow of essential information. Your compliance courses need to engage learners, incentivize participation, and make sure the right people are offered the right training.

So, what authoring tool features should you look out for in your quest to drive strong DEI compliance? Read on.

Embrace learner incentivization

Your organization has a powerful set of built-in incentives to ensure your DEI compliance training is completed. Even if you leave aside the moral argument for keeping all your people included and well-treated, you’re still left with the highly motivating legal and financial repercussions for failing to meet the required standards.

Your people, on the other hand, are a different story. In a busy workforce, you’re inevitably going to come across employees who, for various reasons, don’t feel that same level of urgency toward mandatory training. According to one survey, 20% of employees say they just don’t have time for training. And, among those that do, 63% report completing their training for no other reason than to check a box.

As such, you’re going to want your authoring tool to provide every possible tool for learner incentivization. That means attractive visual themes, ease of use, and rewards for participation like certificates. And, while you’ll likely have more formal mechanisms for reporting on your DEI compliance status, it’s worth looking for an authoring tool that can help you and your learners track when those certificates were earned. After all, it never hurts to know exactly how up to date that all-important DEI compliance training is.

Did you know: Gomo’s assessments are supported by question banks and randomization

If a portion of your workforce is coming to mandatory DEI training with limited time or motivation, you’ll want to make sure that they’re paying attention (and that the information you give them is being retained)!

When you build an assessment in Gomo, you can add an extra layer of integrity to your knowledge checks with the help of question banks. By having your assessment draw questions at random from a wide selection, you’ll ensure that your people can’t just share the answers among themselves. That means they’ll need to immerse themselves in your course and the various interactive elements and visual treats you have in store for them.

Tailor your DEI training

Another way to keep your learners incentivized to participate in DEI training is to keep your content relevant. There’s no better way to discourage your time-poor teams than by exposing them to a bunch of extraneous information—especially since DEI impacts different employees in different ways.

Take diversity, for example. Academics have pointed to a long-standing body of evidence suggesting that hiring processes can be subject to bias against underrepresented groups. That’s exactly the kind of problem that DEI training is there to rectify—but if an employee doesn’t have the power to hire new people, they won’t need to know the finer points of any recruitment-focused sections within your DEI courses.

In this situation, branching scenarios are your friend. The right authoring tool will use display conditions to ensure that certain parts of your DEI courses are only revealed under the right conditions—including user decisions like the role they select. The result? You can put your hiring managers on a different pathway through the content than other employees, ensuring everyone gets the tailored DEI training they need for maximum relevance.

Introduce interactive elements for emotive eLearning

DEI training doesn’t just need to be relevant—it needs to be engaging. Uninspiring mandatory courses won’t get your diversity initiatives very far, and producing content that speaks to the importance of a strong DEI culture is a great way to bring that culture to life.

There’s a wide array of features that the right authoring tool can use to augment your DEI content in that way, but the key quality they’ll all share is some form of interactivity. Gomo’s work for compliance and diversity solutions provider Affirmity is a fantastic case in point. Thanks to Gomo’s extensive range of assets, Affirmity was able to produce unconscious bias training that featured:

• Knowledge check quizzes
• Accordions that directed learner attention toward key details
• Filmstrips that married talking points with imagery

Crucially, Affirmity knew that it needed to prompt the empathetic engagement that allows learners to get to grips with unconscious bias as a topic. That meant telling the stories of characters while maintaining an interactive angle, which Affirmity achieved through the use of subscreens giving examples of unconscious bias when users clicked on a character’s image.