As the profile of the population, workforce and consumer changes, so does the responsibility of every employee to interact effectively with co-workers, as well as consumers, no matter the difference in backgrounds. Knowledge, understanding and exposure to the dimensions of difference increases comfort and acceptance, therefore increasing personal productivity and bottom-line results.

The award-winning series The EDGE Advantage consists of four modules that go beyond the basics of diversity, leveraging multimedia technology to create an individualized and highly interactive learning environment.

Designed to reduce barriers and improve productivity, you’ll interact with a virtual workgroup of individuals who are diverse in many ways and have just been assigned to a newly created department. Each module is a 30-to-45 minute interactive learning experience of realistic workplace dynamics. A brief Introduction module provides some background on the team members and the four-part series includes:

Module 1: The Knowledge EDGE
The Knowledge EDGE© provides the business case for learning about differences and defines the term “diversity” in a way that is easy to understand and is inclusive of everyone. Users meet the Virtual Team that they will be working with, and begin to learn some basics about inclusion in today’s workforce.

Module 2: The Awareness EDGE
This course reveals how we are all influenced at a young age by society’s tendency to “group” people together and assign specific characteristics to each group. Members of the team begin to reveal some of their personal experiences and how they have been impacted by assumptions and stereotypes.

Module 3: The Legal EDGE
As the team continues to develop in their level of trust and candor, concerns about Affirmative Action, quotas, EEOC Laws and many of the misperceptions related to the legal aspects of diversity surface. Participants learn a broader historical context for worker protection laws, and the “virtual team” must make an important business decision.

Module 4: The Competitive EDGE
This course helps participants to understand the internal and external drivers of competitive advantage. They realize that the changing demographics inside their organization increasingly reflect their consumer base. They see that their ability to work together effectively has a direct correlation with how successfully they compete in the marketplace, as well as how consumer’s perception of an organization is linked to how they treat their employees.

Why should I use The EDGE Advantage?

After completing EDGE, organizations are better able to see opportunities for development, as well as strengths within various workgroups, allowing them to reapply best practices. Our innovative approach increases the interactivity of the content delivery by posing questions and surveys within the program series. The data is captured by our proprietary Learning Management System, DQTracs, and provides you with invaluable feedback about the culture of inclusion inside your workforce. You will be better able to meet the needs of your workforce, as well as your consumer, viewing the collective perceptions and concerns by a variety of filters, such as race, ethnicity, gender, age and company position.

We recommend a “blended” learning approach for the topic of diversity and offer a variety of tools and workshops to support our e-learning products:

• A Leader/Manager Guide is available to provide managers with key questions to pose to their workgroups during follow-up discussions after the team has viewed EDGE©.
• Customized facilitated discussion/workshop/de-brief sessions that can be delivered by the client’s trainers or ours. A “Train-the-Trainer” program is also available to equip client trainers to deliver the content.
• Our follow-up eCourse, Reality Bytes™, delivered to individual e-mail accounts, keeps the diversity message fresh by posing real-life scenarios from their environment and soliciting interactive resolution. Encourage employees to think through tough issues and apply their new knowledge through this Diversity-In-Practice™ reinforcement series.
• Call our office today for more information on any of Pope & Associates’ innovative training programs: Consulting Pairs™, SOS: Skills for Ongoing Success™, Diversity Learning Lab™, Managing Personnel Diversity™ and our encore eLearning program: The TEAM Advantage©