Diversity Training Increases Awareness at WGRZ
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Licensed in 1954 and purchased by Gannett in 1997, WGRZ-TV currently employs 130 and its weekly audience is comprised of 537,000 households. WGRZ-TV provides news, weather, sports as well as traffic and many other special features that are of interest to their viewer ship.
Earlier this year, WGRZ-TV made the decision to offer a course to all of their employees on the topic of diversity. They approached the Canisius College Center for Professional Development (CPD) for assistance in developing a program that would meet the goals established for the station by Gannett, their parent company.
CPD developed and delivered the diversity training WGRZ-TV was seeking. The initial step was a planning meeting to allow Canisius to gain a better understanding of what WGRZ-TV expected as a result of the training. Once defined, Canisius prepared and delivered several training programs to employees across the organization.
Perhaps the most interesting observation about this training would be the fact that when WGRZ-TV brought us in,they thought they wanted a course on diversity which they defined as being race, age, gender, religion, sexual orientation and ethnicity. However, after discussion with the management team, we quickly found that what they really wanted to focus on was becoming a culturally competent organization.
Culture is the sum of the “values, rituals, symbols, beliefs, and thought processes that are learned, shared by a group of people and transmitted from generation to generation.” Hence, WGRZ-TV had more interest in focusing on the secondary dimensions of diversity which include income, education, marital status, parental status, geographic location and work background.
Additional workplace diversity topics included:culture,management/non-management, technies/non-technies, employees with families/single employees, departments, Buffalo born/transplant, years in business, personality and education.
The training introduced the idea of a culturally competent workplace. We are all cultural beings but we each have a unique culture. Everyone trained works for WGRZ but each plays a different role and has a different set of experiences, work philosophy and cultural background. We discussed each other’sdifferences and found that it was okay to be different – and in many cases it was more productive and more fun. We also focused on skill building exercises in order to identify strategies to communicate effectively and
appropriately with our unique peers.