Participating with the Engaging Diversity project helped Powys County Council gain an understanding of the steps needed to make eLearning work for their organisation. Before they became partners in the Engaging Diversity Project, Powys County Council had experienced limited success with eLearning.

An attempt to rollout an IT skills eLearning programme had not engaged high volumes of staff. However, with an audience of over 7,000 people to reach the Council wanted to explore how they might use eLearning more effectively. Because of their apprehension about eLearning, the project provided an ideal testing ground for the council to try different measures to engage their workforce with the medium. At the same time, Powys County Council wanted to investigate how they might fulfil the pressing need to build understanding of diversity issues amongst their large and varied workforce.

The council had already implemented a 3-day diversity learning programme for Senior Managers. The expectation had been that Senior Managers would pass on their understanding of diversity issues to staff within their departments. However, the Council soon realised that a more direct approach would be required if they were going to achieve their aim of raising diversity awareness en masse across the organisation. The diversity eLearning programme would put the Council much more in control of the process – it would be possible to track each learner’s progress, providing an ongoing picture of what proportion of the organisation had engaged with the learning. The modules could also be deployed in a variety of ways that would suit the ranging needs of learners from different departments.

Powys County Council were committed to making the eLearning programme work and put several key measures in place to ensure that people within the organisation engaged with the programme. The council made the learning mandatory for everyone and each staff member was informed about the programme via email. A ‘drip-feed’ awareness-raising approach was used to keep staff interested in the programme - including briefings during departmental meetings and promotion through the staff newsletter and the staff intranet.

The Council also put a range of resources in place to make it easy for staff to access and complete the learning. The IT suite was booked for an extended period so that there were always workstations available for users to logon and trial the modules. Dedicated learning sessions were also held in the IT suite. In these instances, a co-ordinator would introduce the programme, allow learners to complete the modules on their own and then return to close the session. A stock of headphones was also made available for departments to hire so that learners could complete the programme in their own time at their workstations if they preferred. “Being able to monitor who had completed the learning and gauge the kind of results being achieved in the tests was really useful, explains Rob Beardall, Organisational Development Officer for Equalities at the council, “we worked with Senior Managers to help them roll-out the modules across their service ”.

The Council expected greater levels of resistance towards completing the learning than they actually experienced – the general attitude was very positive. “In this initial stage we focused on delivering the programme to our office-based staff and a real mix of people took the programme from senior officers down to frontline staff. Changing people’s attitudes towards diversity is a long process but this programme has given us the first step. After the programme people are more inclined to take the equality agenda seriously. We now ask new starters to sit the programme so that they have a clear message about equality from the outset,” says Rob.

In conclusion, allowing different groups within the organisation the flexibility to undertake the learning as they preferred helped to ensure that everyone completed the training. For Powys County Council, eLearning had provided an evocative medium that could begin to develop people’s understanding of diversity. “The programme is emotive in a way that cuts through stigma. Implementing the programme has also changed our opinion of eLearning and proven that we can make it work for our organisation. eLearning will definitely feature in future programmes at Powys County Council, “ Rob concluded.

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