Theme: Social and Civic competences. My soft skills related to diversity awareness.
Developed by: Merseyside Expanding Horizons, United Kingdom.
Aim: To strengthen your awareness on Gender Equality in Employment.
- To strengthen your awareness of Diversity and Equality in Employment.
- To understand the need to be tolerant and patient in the workplace when dealing with diversity issues and thus contribute to the creation of a good and harmonious working environment.
Description: Understanding basic diversity principles and the ability to apply them in practice will help you to protect both you and your colleague’s rights in the workplace.
This exercise will help you to improve your soft skill “awareness of diversity”. Thus, you will get an understanding about different discrimination issues to demonstrate tolerance and patience towards customers and colleagues in the labour market and within workplaces learn about direct and indirect discrimination in relation to diversity issues. As a result you will be more prepared to protect yourself from diversity discrimination in the workplace. For example if you have some of the protective characteristics, the exercise, will give you a better understanding of what you should deem as acceptable behaviour from your work colleagues and also how to act with patience and tolerance in relation to other work colleagues thus protecting you from saying or acting in a way which could be discriminatory.
When working as an effective team member it is important to understand that people are from different backgrounds, have different abilities and also ways of working. Often these differences are due to an individual’s race, age, ethnicity, gender, disability, educational level, social-economic status, or religious and political beliefs. It is therefore important as an effective team member to be aware of these differences, respectful, tolerant and patient when dealing with customers or work colleagues who are different from you.
If you have noticed the case of direct or indirect diversity discrimination in the labour market or at workplace, you could appeal to:
- The Equal Opportunities Ombudsman;
- The court;
- NGO fighting for human rights;
- The employer;
- Mass media.
Learning outcomes: Completing this exercise will enable you to:
- Improve your understanding and be able to demonstrate an awareness of diversity in a work environment;
- Recognise indirect and direct discrimination related to diversity issues in the labour market.
Expected duration: 30 minutes.