September 30, 2001 Sunday News Register - Wheeling, WV By Art Limann, Staff Writer With the terrorist attacks still fresh in people's minds, Alison R. Brown, formerly of Martins Ferry, currently of Pickerington, Ohio, just outside Columbus, is helping businesses and industries run more efficiently by improving internal communications. She is the president and principle consultant of ALMEC International, a Columbus based company, formed in 1995. She also is currently the project leader for the diversity initiative at Firstar/US Bancorp and serves as consultant to the American Red Cross of Greater Columbus. She has served in an adjunct capacity for training projects at Toyota, Chase Manhattan Mortgage, and Goodyear. Brown and her associates at ALMEC International also have trained more then 7,000 employees during the past three years. In addition, while holding various positions, including customer services coordinator and office supervisor for Ohio Power and Columbus Southern Power (now known as American Electric Power) where she worked for 18 years, she facilitated training programs, managed employee relations and employment practices and defined standards for employees. She is a 1977 graduate of Martins Ferry High School, and holds a bachelor of science degree in business administration from Franklin University, where she graduated with academic honors. Brown completed mediation training at Capital Law School in 1994, has been an adjunct professor at Central Ohio Technical College and is currently working on a masters's degree in labor and human resources at Ohio State University. In addition, is contributing a chapter to a soon-to-be published book that brings together business, spiritual and celebrity figures for their personal prescriptions on achievemenet. ALMEC International, she explained, is a business which helps internal communications in U.S. businesses by conducting diversity training tailored to a company's specific needs. "It helps alleviate conflict and helps people relate to each other," Brown said. "American are angry right now," she said. "They are targeting people who had nothing to do with the attacks. Our training provides insight into the differences in people and can be helpful to see how we view other people and react to people, from large to subtle effects." To help define a company's needs, an assessment is conducted. Examples of diversity issues can be gender, race or age (primary dimensions) or culture, income, religious beliefs, education, military status (secondary dimensions). "The dimensions of diversity can vary from one department to another, or from one location to anoter within the same city," she stated. "Diversity issues can even be generational. If you have employees hired right out of high school or college and they work with more senior employees, the groups may have a different, (real or a perceived) work ethic and definition of professionalism. As with any diversity issue, conflict can be the end result." "The word 'diversity' makes some people resistant when they first come into the training session. Many participants think they already know what the course content is and may not be open to diversity training," said Brown. "However, what I've seen, through our training, is participants begin to accept that the training is educational and look at it as a learning experience. By the end of the training participants understand the impact of handling diversity positively," she said. "People find out if they learn to work with others' differences this will increase productivity in the work place. This is our ultimate goal, to increase productivity and profitability of an organization as whole, and individual employees," Brown said. She continued, "The training programs are designed to deal with not only internal but external challenges. If a business can successfully manage diversity in the work place, ultimately employee satisfaction increases and companies can improve the bottom line. ALMEC International has been steadily increasing the number of diversity training sessions since it was formed in 1995. Since 1998 the number of sessions has doubled. In addition to diversity training the company also conducts training in team building, leadership, customer service and supervision. More...