Five Ways to Ensure Quality Sexual Harassment Training
Sexual harassment training is becoming more important as time goes on. It has enormous costs. Most companies focus on the obvious, quantifiable costs of litigation and settlements. But, the financial costs resulting from the impact to the organization’s reputation and culture may be far more than those of litigation.
This issue reached a tipping point on September 30, 2004 when California’s Governor Schwarzenegger signed the AB1825 training law requiring California employers (with 50 employees or more) to provide workplace harassment training to their supervisors every two years. Beginning in 2005, a training market emerged in response to this legal mandate.
Many training companies jumped onto this bandwagon. Soon, attorneys were willing to provide training as a loss leader for commitments to handle employment law work, E-Learning specialists were putting any content online that would meet the minimum requirements of the law. It was the wild-west days in the compliance training business and a lot of poor and/or incorrect training was completed during this time. This led to a lot of mediocre or noncompliant training offerings and options being put forward.
Mediocre Sexual Harassment Training Solutions
Fast-forward to today and participants of online training have come to tolerate boring training that is designed to just “check-the-box” on their compliance requirement. Sadly, too few Learning & Development leaders demand more from training providers and themselves. Instead, they are just happy if people complete the training and don’t complain too much about it.
Whether the training is live and in-person or online, it takes more than just training on the topic to make a difference.
In 2016, Stanford University completed a study on the effectiveness of harassment training. What they uncovered will not surprise anyone familiar with change management; training without leadership and organizational support can backfire and lead to cynicism. In addition, poorly designed and implemented harassment training can be worse than doing none at all as it raises the issues but does not address solutions.
Changing a culture requires more than just launching a Diversity and Inclusion initiative with mediocre training designed to scare managers into submission. The foundation of training has to meet a much higher bar than simple compliance if we are going to meet the expectations of this societal shift.
How to Ensure the Quality of Your Harassment Training
Further, Stanford’s study went on to state that in order for an harassment training initiative to be effective it should be able to clear five important hurdles first.
1) Harassment Training is for everyone. Not just for Managers
The need for recurring training of all employees is important to include. At a minimum California law requires training every other year for managers of people. However, training more than just supervisors and managers is a best practice, train everyone.
EEOC statistics show us that 75% of women report that co-workers have harassed them while only 38% report being harassed by their manager. One-shot training conducted as a result of mere bureaucratic necessity will not be worth the time, effort and money expended and it may only serve to create cynicism in the ranks of the organization.
2) The Training Must Be Engaging, Realistic and Interesting
Many states require harassment training to be interactive but they often leave this up to the marketplace to define how high the bar is on the word “interactive”. To have a participant sit at their computer and read a scenario then answer a few questions about the nuanced implications of a generic situation, is not interactive training.
In effective training, participants must have realistic and ideally, even customized scenarios if the training is to have credibility and hold participants attention. Lauren Edelman, UC Berkeley law professor, said she suspects some backlash could stem from the “cartoonish, somewhat unrealistic” harassment examples that trainings often include – lessons that can make participants skeptical and resentful and worst of all make them feel like this is a waste of time.
3) Address the Subtle Points of Harassment
The way harassment manifests itself today is much more subtle than is represented in many of the acted out scenarios. The borderline cases of harassment in the workplace have to be brought into the training.
In 2016, 97% of cases of Sexual Harassment were non-physical. Not all situations are harassment.,Sometimes it is simply a case of bad judgment, but this can still have a serious impact to people and organizations. The borderline cases, offsite behavior and a manager’s responsibility must be addressed in the training.
4) Communicate the Investigation Process
The purpose of the investigation is to gather the facts, not to fire the accused person. Not every accuser is correct justified in their assessment of the situation or HR would not need to do investigation. The training should cover retaliation and what to do if you’re accused as well as how to (not) respond. These points must be stressed. (John, I’m not sure how to read the word “(not)” in this second to last sentence. Are you trying to say, “… how to respond or not respond”? The biggest problem managers have if they are accused of harassment is to react at all. It will most likely be interpreted as retaliation so the best advice for managers is to do nothing.
5) Acknowledge that Same Sex Harassment Occurs
According to EEOC statistics, male-on-female harassment is actually declining while same-sex sexual harassment is increasing. Male-on-male harassment was up 17% in 2015. Female-on-male harassment is still relatively unusual.
Sexual harassment training measures are good tools, but their effectiveness is greatly enhanced through follow-up training and reinforcement in the culture and by leadership. California’s AB 1825 recognizes that the most effective learning comes from education that is reinforced and recurring
Because of the enormous cost of liability to companies hiring professionals to help with your training in this arena might be some of the best money your company can spend.
Do you have questions about harassment training? Let me know. I’m here to help.
John Boring
CEO & President
Accelerate Learning & Development
JohnBoring@accelerate-ld.com
