Creating a High Performing Team that maximizes individual talent and increases teamwork has never been more important. 74% of employees indicate that they "like their work, and are willing to do more than is expected" with only 2/3 of respondents indicating that they are "committed to staying" with their company through the remainder of the year. As few as 21% of these individuals indicate that they may be fully engaged. At the same time, increased global competition has caused many organizations to reduce headcount in order to cut costs. How, then, do we improve our team performance, and increase productivity, innovation and our bottom time?

Leveraging the true power of diversity inside your teams, to engage your employees and gain your competitive edge has never been more important. Workplace Diversity: The Team Advantage™ is designed to improve the ability of your workforce to engage and interact more effectively with co-workers who are different than themselves, and to learn the characteristics and value of High Performing Teams.

Four courses in The Team Advantage™ series leverage multimedia technology to create an individualized and highly interactive learning environment. The program engages the employee with a virtual workgroup of individuals who are diverse in many ways and have just been assigned to a new team to develop a high performance initiative for their company. Each course is a 30-45 minute interactive learning experience of realistic workplace dynamics.

Module 1: High Performing Teams
Participants engage with their new “virtual team” and begin to explore the definitions, characteristics and skills associated with High Performance Teams and Organizations, and why this training is important to the bottom-line impact of any and every organization. Barriers to teamwork are presented, in addition to a discussion about workforce engagement and commitment in general as well as within the participant’s specific organization.

Module 2: Strengthening Diverse Teams
As the team begins to become more comfortable in their new setting, they explore some basic concepts about diversity, and begin to learn that leveraging their diversity of experience and strengths can lead to increased performance. We begin to see that “filters” applied to our daily task performance can hinder a High Performing Team, and this fresh insight leads into discussing potential barriers to success, managing assumptions, the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion of team members and the shared responsibility of on-boarding new employees and setting team norms.

Module 3: Interpersonal Skills & Constructive Feedback
One of the most critical tasks of any High Performing Team is establishing a competent set of interpersonal skills ~ communicating effectively. Working together in a team environment may be challenging, but the “virtual team” learns more about handling conflict and addressing tough issues. Participants learn several tools to help them through this process, including the BICA model for providing feedback, the concept of Intent versus Impact, addressing inappropriate remarks and behavior, as well as establishing norms of support for each other.

Module 4: Team Skills & Accountability
In the final module, the team brings all of their learning together and focuses on skills specifically important to a High Performing Team environment, including developing skills necessary for listening and hearing ideas and solutions of others, problem solving and making decisions. The participants finally learn to engage their team in developing an inclusive culture of feedback, mutual accountability and contributing to the development of others, by directly addressing inherent prejudicial “filters” that hold us back from truly becoming a High Performing Team. In conclusion, each participant develops an interactive, personalized Action Plan.

Workplace Diversity: The Team Advantage™ Goes Beyond Education! Measure Attitudes, Beliefs and Behavior in “Real-Time”!

One of the most innovative aspects of The Team Advantage is that in addition to providing an engaging, interactive learning experience for participants with premium content, it also has the capability of surveying your employees while they are learning!

Our unique Learning Management System developed along with The Team Advantage creates an opportunity to provide invaluable feedback about the collective behaviors, perceptions and concerns of your workforce. By filtering data by race, gender, ethnicity and age, TEAM can provide invaluable feedback about the quality of your organization’s High Performance Characteristics, including:

• Team Hesitance & Engagement Profile
• Personal Filters Impact Area (General, Communication, Feedback & Development)
• Organizational On-boarding Effectiveness Survey
• Informal Inclusion Matrix
• Personal Development Opportunity Matrix
• Effective Relationship Index

Our e-Learning provides not only exceptional content, but a spring-board from which to launch an effective High Performing Team initiative, with invaluable data on where your employees are ... and where you should go … to truly maximize your competitive edge and increase your bottom-line productivity.

About Diversity University…

Diversity University’s e-learning products are built on solid, research-driven content, provided by partner diversity consulting and training firm Pope & Associates, Inc., delivered through a robust learning management system, and utilizing an engaging, interactive approach. The material is backed by proven Intellectual Property that has been tested with hundreds of thousands of individuals over 30 years. Established in 2002, MYCA-Pope, Inc. is a women-owned business enterprise with a proven track record. The principals of the company are seasoned professionals with extensive experience in diversity, training and technology. The company was formed as a collaborative effort with Pope & Associates to repurpose invaluable intellectual property into an e-learning delivery model. MYCA-Pope offers its clients turnkey e-learning training solutions that are highly interactive, dynamic, affordable and have measurable impact, by improving relationships across the board, and recognizing the value that differences among people can bring to the table.

Various courses are available including The EDGE Advantage©, The TEAM Advantage© and follow-up Reality Bytes© reinforcement e-courses. All courseware is AICC and SCORM compliant and can be delivered in several ways – through the DU website, through a client’s intranet site or via CD Rom. Each course series in the Diversity University library focuses on delivering a dynamic and highly interactive learning experience for users in a personalized and thought-provoking manner, in order to maximize personal application and skill building.