Most Harassment-Prevention Training Doesn’t Work

And the EEOC Wants You to Do Something About It

At the height of the #MeToo movement, Elizabeth Tippett, a law professor and expert on harassment-prevention training, made a startling discovery: Not only was most sexual-harassment training ineffective, it could actually be making the problem worse.

Her research showed what even US government organizations like the EEOC have begun to understand: Most compulsory training aimed at educating managers and workers about what harassment is and how to avoid it fails miserably.

Rather than educating learners, the training has generally served as a legal fig leaf, shielding companies from liability should those learners cross the line. In a 2016 report, the EEOC wrote, “Much of the training done over the last 30 years has not worked as a prevention tool — it’s been too focused on simply avoiding legal liability.”

Avoiding people is not the answer

The trainings fail to teach people what harassing behavior is — and is not. And interactions between men and women at work are under greater scrutiny. A response chosen by more and more male managers is simply avoiding contact with women at work.

That’s right: Harassment-prevention training could lead to more gender-based discrimination.

A study conducted by LeanIn.org in February found that 60% of male managers were “uncomfortable participating in a common work activity with a woman, such as mentoring, working alone, or socializing together” — a 32% jump in just a year.

Why? #MeToo put interactions between men and women at work into a megawatt spotlight. A majority of those “uncomfortable” managers said that “they’ve avoided mentoring or socializing with a woman because they were nervous about how it would look,” the LeanIn study said, meaning that these managers are choosing discriminatory behavior over behavior that they worry could be seen as harassing.

Discrimination and harassment — two sides of the same coin

But they’re essentially discriminating against women to avoid discriminating against women.

The focus on avoiding liability shifted emphasis away from framing harassment as discriminatory and an abuse of power. Current trainings, Tippett wrote, “suggest that harassment is not bad because it is morally wrong or a form of discrimination, but because it’s bad for business.” These “trainings fail to emphasize that inclusion and equal employment opportunity are the driving force behind Title VII and its prohibition on harassment,” she wrote. Simply put: Harassment is a type of discrimination.

The business focus is often coupled with laughably bad training that uses exaggerated and obvious examples of harassing or inappropriate behavior, rather than using realistic, relatable examples that underscore the difference between, say, a manager and his female direct report sharing an Uber to a business meeting or a work dinner and that same manager inviting her for after-work drinks so they can get to know each other better.

The combination of bad training with a legalistic justification can lead employees to decide that it’s easier or safer to avoid informal contact with potential harassment victims — women, people of color, and others — than to figure out when behavior veers from respectful toward offensive or harassing.

The obvious problem with that response is that denying women or minorities opportunities that some male employees have, such as dinners or outings with executives and closed-door meetings, is discriminatory, even if the managers claim they’re just playing it safe.

The remedy? A holistic anti-harassment culture

The EEOC sees training as an essential element in preventing harassment, but only as part of a comprehensive effort: “The most important lesson we learned from our study is that employers must have a holistic approach for creating an organizational culture that will prevent harassment,” the report said. Among their recommendations:

• Foster a culture, extending from top-level executives to all employees, promoting respect and communicating and demonstrating that harassment is not tolerated.
• Devote sufficient resources to harassment prevention and mitigation efforts to both ensure the efforts are effective and reinforce the no-tolerance message.
• Devise and publicize clear and unambiguous policies that explain prohibited conduct, provide examples, and spell out both the reporting and investigation processes.
• Offer regular training “on a dynamic and repeated basis to all employees” that focuses on unacceptable behaviors and “conduct that, if left unchecked, might rise to the level of illegal harassment.”
• Offer workplace civility training and/or bystander intervention training to all employees, “focused on the positive — what employees and managers should do, rather than on what they should not do.”

Relevant harassment-prevention training is part of the package

Training content needs to be specific and relatable to your learners. To that end, the EEOC recommends against “canned, ‘one-size-fits-all’ training." Instead training should:

• Be tailored to the specific realities of different workplaces
• Use examples and scenarios that involve realistic situations from the specific worksite, organization and/or industry
• Be conducted in multiple languages or include cultural adaptations as appropriate
• Clarify what is not harassment and explain what acceptable workplace behavior looks like
• Educate workers about their rights and responsibilities
• Describe the complaint process

Above all, the EEOC emphasizes that harassment-prevention training should be reinforced regularly using varied approaches and content, and that trainers should evaluate training “some time after” completion and by soliciting meaningful feedback from rank-and-file employees.

Make OttoLearn part of your solution

OttoLearn’s adaptive agile microlearning platform provides relevant, continuous training. Adaptive training algorithms target appropriate and individualized content to managers, executives and employees at all levels.

Variable reinforcement schedules make it easy to ensure that workers learn and remember key content throughout the year, underscoring the importance of the anti-harassment content to management far more effectively than scant attention once a year would.

Best of all, it’s easy to build content for Otto that is relevant and necessary for your workers and your organization. Your training Modules can include specific examples of actions to avoid, media resources including short videos that illustrate appropriate and inappropriate behavior or feature managers talking about how to handle common situations, and content that encourages inclusive and appropriate behavior.

Add content on reporting processes and explain disciplinary measures and other consequences of inappropriate behavior for a well-rounded training package.

OttoLearn is an easy way to add anti-harassment training to new employee onboarding and to ensure that all employees learn and retain best practices for appropriate, respectful and inclusive behavior.