We are in the infancy stages of our Diversity & Inclusion journey and one of the things we wanted to do initially was train our associates on the importance of having a diversity & inclusion strategy and the impacts of bias.

We engaged with a diversity consultant to help jumpstart us on this education journey. As we are new to this program, it was important to us to utilize a subject matter expert to help bring credibility to this initiative. She piloted four sessions with us and then trained us on critical components necessary for an effective training.

With a strong connection to our learning and development team, we were able to develop and customize our own Unconscious Bias training with the thought to train all of our People Managers in 2019. We wanted to target the audience that was responsible for the daily personnel decisions (i.e. hiring, promoting, succession planning, etc.) However, as we continued to learn and train associates, it was clear that this was, at the root, a human problem and we wanted every associate to take this training.

To date we have trained over 1,000 associates with a 94% customer satisfaction rate. Everyone continues to express how much they enjoy the class. We had a pilot session in Europe and are working towards a follow up training with their management team, and we are in early stages of customizing a training for our Asian colleagues. The plan is to create a training that will ultimately reach every Milliken associate.

Ricaye Harris