Culture Conversation: Diversity

The College of Medicine’s Culture Conversation is a series of video interviews, material and other items designed to help leaders, faculty, staff and students of the college build their professional toolbox and strengthen the college’s workplace and educational culture.

Each month, the Culture Conversation focuses on a new topic. For December, the subject is Diversity.

The monthly Culture Conversation is part of Nebraska Medicine and the College of Medicine “Be Extraordinary Together” effort, an effort to further tie the organizational culture to our shared ITEACH values.

See more information and conversation starters on listening.

In addition, human resources and the UNMC Office of Health Professions Education have been working to ensure that a culture of diversity and inclusion is communicated to all colleagues. There will be a stepped approach to foundational training until a larger strategy is developed by the diversity and inclusion officer, who will hopefully be hired in January.

  • Beginning in January, all leaders and culture champions will be assigned the “Excellence through Bridging Differences” 20-minute module to complete via Apollo by the end of the month. Developed in conjunction with UNMC, this education will define diversity and inclusion terms, share stories about how to recognize unconscious bias, exclusion, cultural and linguistically appropriate standards and more.
  • After the independent learning from the module in Apollo, leaders will be prompted to select a one-hour Zoom session led by experts in diversity and inclusion. This session will offer activities that foster discussion and clarity on diversity and inclusion issues, so that managers are empowered to continue these conversations with colleagues when it will be assigned to them in February/March 2021. These topics will also be interwoven into monthly Culture Conversations.
  • This module will also be required as foundational for all new colleagues to be completed within their first 90 days of hire.
  • Managers will be notified of the training via the HR Checklist and will have it assigned to them via Apollo.
  • All colleagues will have it assigned to them via Apollo with an email notification to complete it within 60 days.
  • To continually assess our culture of diversity and inclusion, you may have noticed the question on our latest pulse survey “People are treated equally at Nebraska Medicine regardless of their differences (i.e., differences in background, age, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, opinions, etc.)”
  • In addition to the required training, we invite you to access our other diversity and inclusion resources such as CultureVision located in the clinical resources section of our intranet, and the Diversity and Inclusion resources we share with UNMC, also located on our clinical resources section of the intranet. You can also search “diversity and inclusion” in Apollo for more webinars and modules on this topic.