Developing working practices at Wrexham County Council
In our modern society, understanding of diversity can have an impact on many aspects of our work. Keith Lane, Credit Union Development Officer at Wrexham County Borough Council found that undertaking a diversity eLearning programme helped broaden his awareness and influenced his approach to key tasks at work.
Wrexham County Borough Council chose to try a blended approach for implementing their diversity learning programme, featuring a mix of workshops and online learning modules. A workshop was scheduled both before and after completing the programme to help participants put their learning in to context.
Working within the council’s Economic Development Department, Keith was responsible for establishing a new credit union. Keith’s main tasks were to engage a board of directors, set-up a study group and recruit volunteers to meet the registration requirements of the Financial Services Authority. Keith had not undertaken any diversity programmes prior to Engaging Diversity and had expected the programme to focus mainly on legislative aspects.
Keith says: “The modules covered all the necessary legislation but were really helpful because they went a step further and considered what implications the legislation has in the work place”. Keith found the opportunities to reflect on how you were going to alter your thinking and behaviour after each module really valuable. This aspect enabled Keith to clarify his own and his department’s responsibilities in terms of diversity. “We needed to formulate an Equality and Diversity policy for the credit union. We were able to use much of the information learnt from the modules to prepare this document,” Keith explains.
At the workshop after the programme different departments discussed how the learning had impacted the delivery of their service. This became a valuable opportunity for departments to share best practice ideas that had been implemented since completing the programme.
In conclusion, the programme enabled Keith and his team to understand how important diversity was to their organisation. They were able to put measures into place to ensure that they recruited individuals of diverse ages, cultural backgrounds and genders for their board of directors. They also realised that their marketing activity had to be planned carefully to help them attract membership from all different groups in society. “I greatly appreciated this programme – it fulfilled the needs we expected it to and delivered the learning in a way people could take seriously,” Keith added.