Five guiding principles to help to improve diversity training assessment

Abstract

Abstract Purpose – Provides clear guidelines to diversity training practitioners to help to improve assessment of training. Encourages cross-talk between academics and practitioners. Design/methodology/approach – Reviews some of the research on the benefits versus costs of diversity training assessment and generates five core principles to help practitioners to identify and exploit assessment opportunities. Findings – Reveals that most diversity training initiatives are neither routinely nor systematically assessed, in spite of there being clear business benefits from doing so, such as improved diversity management, enhanced organizational efficacy and increased responsiveness to diversity needs. Suggests reasons for the lack of assessment, such as lack of an obvious pay-off for business, suspicion and fear of what assessment might reveal, and lack of experience among practitioners of how to optimally assess their initiatives. Provides five core principles to guide practitioners through the process of assessment: deriving testable hypotheses; obtaining baseline data or using naturally occurring control groups to get an index of change; ensuring assessment measures appropriately tap goals of training and training, itself; considering short and longer term assessment approaches and taking into account the wider organizational context. Practical implications – Enables diversity training practitioners to engage with the process of assessment, a topic that receives very little attention in spite of the widespread use of diversity training as a means of enhancing diversity management. Social Implications – Discusses an important problem: the lack of systematic appraisal of diversity training. Better assessment techniques will lead to more accurate knowledge about diversity training outcomes which will, in the long run, enhance diversity management. Originality/value – Bridges the gap between the academic work on this topic and practitioners’ needs for clearly articulated ideas to help them put theory and research about assessment into practice. Article type – Conceptual/review paper Keyword(s) – Diversity training; Assessment; Evaluation