Here are some things that might be helpful as you prepare for your upcoming sessions:

We recommend sending employees an email before you add the workshop(s) to their calendars (and resend as a reminder 3 days before the workshops). Below is a suggested template you can copy and paste, but definitely edit it to match your needs and culture:

“Hello everyone! We are excited to announce an upcoming equity and inclusion workshop series that kick starts on ___/____ at _____.  Here’s everything you need to know to prepare:

• Why this workshop now?
  [insert a sentence or two explaining why you and your leadership chose this series now]. Example: We are aware that we don’t know what we don’t know, and after speaking with experts and employees, we believe an important first step is more education so that we can have more robust discussions, which can then inform better company-wide decisions.  These workshops are not meant to “tick off” a box, our commitment is that they are a step towards more informed action. They are the first step in us creating a more robust E&I 2025 strategy.

• Will these workshops suck? 
  We chose a trainer based very much on this question. Amy Jeffers’ workshops come well recommended for their ability to give us a ton of brain-friendly and science-backed information, in a style that fits our culture and our values. Bonus: this workshop will not include forced-discussions, roleplaying, or put anyone on the spot to “speak for their people”. The first session is designed to instead give each person a chance to get curious, time to digest a ton of new information and process that info through self-reflection. The second and further workshops dive straight into skills that support equity and inclusion work at the team, department and company level.

• Are these workshops mandatory? 
  It’s kind of like washing your hands. No one on the leadership team or in HR is going to follow you around to make sure you wash your hands at key moments in the day because we totally trust you to do the right thing. Why? Because we know you care about yourself and your coworkers. These workshops feel very similar to us. We are excited to see everyone there because we know how much you care about your coworkers, being a better workplace, and personal and professional growth.

• What kind of participation or activities will be required?
  All of the workshops include quiet, solo exercises throughout, and you will also have time to ask questions and opt to join the discussion via audio or chat. No one will be forced to share so that everyone can learn at their own pace, in their own style.

• Will the session be recorded so I can watch it later?

  We will not record sessions so that everyone feels free to share and ask questions without hesitation. However, we will send out a slide deck pdf after the class so you can review anytime!

• Will I need to have the camera on/ mic on?  
  Having your camera on for the first five minutes can be really helpful so the rest of your team can see "who's all here"  (it's an easy way to build trust and get a sense of the "social landscape" for other attendees). However, after the first five minutes you're free to turn your camera and mic off and just focus on learning, the exercises and joining in via the chat window.
  
  Thank you in advance for joining us and let us know what other questions you may have!
  [~signed by your leadership]”
  
  
  
  

Amy Jeffers (LinkedIn) is an Equity & Inclusion educator and founder of Flourish Training. She helps organizations understand the role our brains play and often get in the way of us building equitable and inclusive workplaces (hint: it’s called bias)! Her approach combines neurology, nerdy research, quiet reflection, and humor to re-envision workplaces that foster belonging. Before launching Flourish, Amy spent 13 years in the recruiting industry where she was a leader of top-performing teams, a trailblazer for local and national DEI efforts, and a consultant to hundreds of companies navigating their DEI journeys. As a white-bodied person in this field, she works to use her unearned privilege for good, engaging with the responsibility to be an instrument for change and leading by example through this messy, non-linear and often slow journey. She hails from Flint, MI and now calls Portland home where she enjoys the foodie culture, the forest and the ocean, and building communities where EVERYONE can FLOURISH.

The week of the workshop: 

Whenever possible, we recommend having managers check in with employees at their team meetings or on Slack about the workshop to help them remove any scheduling barriers. This also helps send the message to all employees that leadership is walking the talk of caring about this issue. You will receive a reminder email from us as well, a week before the workshop, so you have all the details handy.

Required: We hiiiiiiiighly recommend that 90% of senior leadership be present at these workshops, otherwise it will send a signal to employees that the commitment to learning is not shared or that there is a double standard created for leadership. It’s the fastest way to erode trust in any future E&I work you plan to do.

After single workshop:

We will send you a link where employees can access and download the pdf of next steps, slides, and worksheets for easy reference. You’ll also want to communicate in between the sessions that this is part of a series. Employees may want to discuss amongst themselves and with their managers their thoughts on the workshops, so it’s also advised to support managers to be in “feedback gathering mode” and not in “analysis” or in “defending mode”. Whatever feedback or thoughts an employee shares, it’s ok for the manager’s response to be “Thank you for sharing that, would you mind if I share that as part of the feedback we’re collecting about the workshops? I can make it anonymous if that’s more helpful?”  Feedback gathering on how employees respond is an important first step that managers can take, that will continue building trust with their teams throughout this process.

After the FULL workshop series:

• Workshop attendees will have a resource guide to walk away with, and managers will receive a list of meeting prompts that can help guide team or department level conversations.

• Employees will want to know what's next after the workshops.

  For example “After we complete the full workshop series, the leadership team will begin meeting the week of__ /___to discuss which target areas, projects and pilots we’ll first be focusing on. We welcome your thoughts and feedback from now through ___/___ via email”. This is just an example, feel free to connect with me if you’d like help creating a communications plan and next steps game plan.

• If you have a Change Team that will be deciding on the company’s next steps (including which of the options we discussed in the workshops best fit your company goals), you can also choose to at that juncture, start working with an E&I consultant or with a facilitator to help keep those Change Team meetings productive and efficient. I would be happy to connect you to E&I-trained colleagues I recommend, depending on what kind of post-workshop support you’d like.

Feel free to connect with me along the way if you have any questions or if you’d like advice, feedback on, or even just a thinking partner about your company’s response and preparations to the trainings: You can email me at amy@flourish-training.com or book your time with me here.