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Tuesday, July 29, 2003
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WOW Diversity Calendar debuts this week
The Diversity (DVO) Office's new Weaving Our Worlds Diversity Calendar goes
online this week. The calendar is an expansive, educational resource accessible
to all Laboratory personnel and promotes diversity awareness and understanding.
It contains more than 800 observances, including cultural, religious and historical
events. It also includes the birthdays of heroes and famous people from diverse
backgrounds. There are poets, filmmakers, scientists such as J. Robert Oppenheimer,
Glenn Seaborg and Luis Alvarez, artists, writers, musicians, political leaders
and even activists.
As an educational resource, the diversity calendar can help leaders and teams
build a more inclusive work environment, said Lisa Gutierrez, DVO director. "Understanding
co-workers is crucial to effective teaming and communication. In reality, culturally
neutral workplaces are not possible. Employees don't stop being Christian,
Hindu, Japanese or gay when the weekend is over," said Gutierrez, also
noting that employees have told DVO they want more diversity awareness training.
To mark the rollout of the calendar, DVO is sponsoring a Diversity Trivia
Contest. Six employees will win lunch with Laboratory Director G. Peter Nanos
(see sidebar story).
"The diversity calendar is an important event planning tool in weaving
diversity into Laboratory operations. Public holidays and observances important
to a specific culture or religion are marked with a purple 'X,' indicating
that they should be considered when scheduling meetings," according to
Laurie Quon of Communication Arts and Services (IM-1), developer of the WOW
calendar. "Workers can use the calendar to avoid schedule conflicts for those invited
or determine back-up plans to get information to teammates who might not be
able to attend a given meeting because of a cultural or religious obligation," Quon
added.
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This is as crucial for planning employee functions
as it is for international conferences, said Quon. For example, to demonstrate
mutual respect, a team that includes Jewish members might avoid scheduling
a
function during Rosh Hashanah, an observance important to the Jewish
community. "This promotes an inclusive environment by eliminating
conflicting obligations for team members," says Quon.
"DVO wanted a more sophisticated calendar than is available commercially.
By licensing the calendar content from Diversity Resources Inc., an outside
vendor that produces diversity calendars, the Diversity Office leveraged
that firm's selection of observances and information with IM-8 programming
and DVO design work," explained Quon.
"Though we've licensed the selection of observances with their
descriptions, the rest of the calendar was developed internally. Doing
so allowed us to augment observance descriptions with images, photos
and multimedia to give the calendar more depth. It often links to sound
and video clips from learning sites such as the Smithsonian Institute,
Discovery Channel, PBS, and National Geographic. It is the most expansive
of any existing online diversity calendar," Quon said.
Quon explained that most online diversity calendars require constant
upkeep for moveable observances such as Martin Luther King Jr. Day,
which changes dates annually. In addition, a large number of observances
are not based on the Gregorian calendar, with which most people are familiar.
The DVO calendar requires little to no maintenance for the next five
years because the dates and observances in the calendar are automatically
updated. The WOW calendar is integrated with the institutional Laboratory
events calendar and includes events sponsored by the Diversity Affirmative
Action Board and the seven Diversity Working Groups. It also is Web accessible
for disabled Lab workers.
Additionally, images and other media associated with future events will
be added to the WOW calendar, Quon added.
The Weaving Our Worlds calendar is at http://lanldb1.lanl.gov/lanl/lanlevents.nsf/networkredirectForWOWCalendar?OpenAgent online.
For complete details about the calendar's development and uses, see the
list of Frequently Asked Questions at http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/dvo/WOWCalendar/CalendarFAQs.pdf online.
(Adobe Acrobat Reader required) |
Diversity trivia contest: Win lunch with Director Nanos
Access the contest questionnaire at http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/dvo/WOWCalendar/LunchWithPete.html online.
The answers can be found in the new diversity calendar at
http://lanldb1.lanl.gov/lanl/lanlevents.nsf/networkredirectForWOWCalendar?OpenAgent online.
The
calendar also can be accessed from the DVO homepage at http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/dvo/ online
by clicking on the WOW calendar icon.
Six Lab employees will be chosen to meet, talk and have
lunch with Laboratory Director G. Peter Nanos.
Here are the questions:
- What Laboratory founder was born during
the third week of April?
- What speaker was sponsored by the Hispanic
Diversity Working Group on Cinco de Mayo?
- What cultural group
celebrates its heritage month in May?
- July 26 was the 13th anniversary
of a U.S. law that assures certain rights to employees with special
needs.
What law is
that?
Here is how contest works:
- All questionnaires must be submitted
and received by the Diversity Office by midnight, Aug. 7. Questionnaires
received after
this date won't be considered.
- All submissions with
the correct answers will be put in a "hat."
- Six winners
will be chosen at random.
- The six winners will win lunch with
Nanos at a date to be announced by DVO.
- The contest is open
to all employees and subcontract workers at the Laboratory.
- All fields in the questionnaire must be completed; only one
entry per person.
- The decision of the Diversity Office in selecting
the contest winners is final.
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