Teams of 3rd year psychology students will assist you and your organization with a diversity or inclusion issue on the work floor. The teams will follow a four-step approach to provide the organization with insights and recommendations to address diversity and inclusion challenges within the organization.

Check out this blogpost to read about how the company Enlight Ed experienced their participation.

✅ Key features of the challenge

• Students per team: 4-5 students
• Programme: 3rd year Bachelor degree Psychology
• Course: Diversity and Inclusion at Work
• No. of hours spent per team: 180
• Duration: April - June
• Deliverables: Presentation and report (in the form of slides) with recommendations and in-depth analysis
• Company time investment: 1 hour a week, 8-12 hours in total (weekly (short) meetings, interviews, final presentation, etc.)
• Matching fee: €750,- (ex tax, charged by Master Challenge (NOT the university))
• Students and supervisors are willing to sign NDA and any other equivalent contract;

📑 Examples of inclusion and diversity challenges on the work floor

• Maximizing heterogeneous teams’ output
• Recruiting for diversity
• Improving the position of (specific) minority groups in the organization
• Evaluating performance without bias
• In the course, all kinds of characteristics are being looked at (age, gender, sexual preference,  ethnicity, disabilities, BMI, etc.) that people can be excluded on in various stages of the employee life cycle (recruitment, selection, onboarding, performing, turnover, etc.).
• Find a possible template and earlier examples here

🔬 The student teams will assist their partner organization in four steps

1. Scoping: The team will meet with the organization and define the challenge. The team will endeavor to fully understand the challenge, consider the boundaries of the challenge, and set expectations on both sides.
2. Information gathering: The team will engage with the organization to collect information relevant to the challenge. In this phase the teams may, for example, interview stakeholders, look at policies, or investigate existing data.
3. Analyzing and evaluating: The teams will compare their findings to diversity and inclusion best practices and scientific literature. During this phase, the teams may re-engage with the organization for clarification purposes.
4. Recommending: After considering the findings in the organization and best practices around the topic of the challenge, the team will write a succinct report in which they present recommendations to address the challenge. Additionally, the team will provide a recorded presentation that supports the written report.

🏢 Company Requirements

• The organization needs to be large enough to have diversity and inclusion challenges on the work floor.
• The organization needs to offer the students the opportunity to engage with various stakeholders to obtain a complete picture.

💰 Costs

Master Challenge is organizing this challenge-based learning program free of charge for educational organizations. In order to cover costs like company recruitment, platform development, marketing, etc. Master Challenge issues a matching fee of €750,- (ex tax) per team. This is to be able to further operate and close the gap between education and practice.

❗️You will only be charged when matched to a team.

📨 How to apply

You can submit the challenge directly through the website. Provide a title that summarizes the challenge. Subsequently, briefly elaborate on your challenge (max. 150 words). Click here for a template you can use.

Planning

• April 9: Deadline for submitting your challenge
• April 9: Receiving message if your challenge is approved by the Course Coordinator
• April 9: Course kick-off
• April 9-11: Matching phase
  • April 9: Student teams rank the challenges
  • April 11: Challenge owners rank the teams that want to work on their challenge
• April 14: Matches are communicated
• April 17: Kick-off meeting with your team
• May 28, 09:00 – 17:00: Final presentations in time slots of 20 minutes (after you are matched to a team, we will schedule the time slots)
• June 11: Students share a report summarizing their advice