The Village of Schaumburg defines diversity as any difference that makes a difference. As a community, Schaumburg continues to grow more diverse, making it important for staff to understand that residents may come to the Village with different experiences, needs, and perspectives. This shared understanding helps Village employees provide better customer service to residents, business owners, and visitors. Over the past several years, the Village held its Making Fans of the Diverse Customers We Serve training to ensure that all employees have this baseline understanding of the richness of differences in our community and shared goal of providing excellent customer service to all.

The Village presented the initial training through a series of small group, interactive, short trainings with the staff. Getting approximately 650 employees through this training took two years but now the Village offers the training once a semester to allow new employees to attend. The training is focused primarily on customer service and centered on the fact that Schaumburg’s community demographics have been steadily diversifying. It includes examples of real-life, challenging customer interactions that were collected directly from different departments in the Village. Participants are given an opportunity to work through these experiences in small groups, share their own experiences with others, and learn techniques and tools to handle similar interactions in the future.

By shifting to smaller, in-person trainings centered around professional skills rather than a broad definition of DEI, the Village found that staff entered the trainings with a focus on the village core value of service to all and engaged much more actively in discussions.

Additionally, the Village has learned that a variety of trainings work best for their workforce. To compliment the in-person trainings described above, the Human Resources Department leads an employee driven committee that is presenting educational content through its People Driving Progress Intranet Page. After the Village commissioned a report on immigration impacts in Schaumburg in 2020, review sessions of the report were held with the management team across the organization. Overwhelmingly, staff expressed an interest in learning more about the different cultures of people now living in Schaumburg. To that end, each quarter, the Village’s UNITE group (which stands for Understanding Neighbors Individuality Through Education) focuses on one of the top immigrant populations in Schaumburg and puts together resources for staff to learn about food, music, languages, celebrations, and holidays from this culture.