Some organizations struggle to keep quality employees in their businesses, and after a climate survey was sent out and after talking with multiple employees, one organization learned that this was due to discrimination, microaggressions, and exclusion that spread through their workplace, resulting in a toxic and negative work environment. A business goal was created to address this:  To reduce the company's turnover rate from 30% to 10%, the company culture will improve 20% by Q4 as the employees and managers engage in D.E.I. efforts. 

If this was a project for a client, I would use the business goal to first identify the problem: the problem is the company's high turnover rate, then I would ask myself the questions below to determine the performance problems and behavior changes needed to meet the business goal. 

Is there a performance problem? 

Yes. There is a high turnover rate due to an unsafe work environment created by the lack of accountability and inclusion. Specifically, according to the survey results, most employees did not know how to advocate for their marginalized colleagues; others, including those with good intentions, committed microaggressions against them fairly often. 

Is the problem worth solving? 

Yes. Not only does allyship, empathy, and inclusion affect marginalized employees and non-marginalized employees alike, studies show that organizations who not only adopt D.E.I. training, but actively practice the skills taught within it, result in not only happier employees, but also an increase in profits. 

Is the problem caused by a lack of knowledge of skill? 

Yes. It wasn't that the non-marginalized employees were bad people who wanted to do harm, and it wasn't that they didn't care, it was because they had different lived experiences and had no knowledge or training of how to support their marginalized co-workers.

To figure out what I wanted learners to do as opposed to what I wanted them to know, I adopted Cathy Moore's action mapping strategy. My action map can be found here. A Word version of my action map can be found here.

By action mapping through the MindMeister tool, I determined that empathy was one of the core behaviors employees needed to demonstrate to meet the business goal and solve the problem. 

I then established which actions could be answered without eLearning first, then the key skills that could be addressed through eLearning. Through this process, I realized that, to be truly inclusive, employees need a firm understanding of D.E.I., what microaggressions are and how to address them, and finally, they need actionable steps they can take to be allies and advocates for their minority colleagues; eLearning courses could be created to address these needs.

Within this design document, I determined the modality in which the training would be delivered, the target audience, the course outline and storyboard, the learning objectives needed to be assessed, and clarified how success will be measured through each of these eLearning experiences.