Let’s face it, no one expects a mandated harassment-training program to actually change workplace behavior or employee team dynamics. Despite 30 years of corporate-sponsored harassment training, we still have just about the same number of harassment claims each year. Ironically, a year before the #MeToo movement, the U.S. government commissioned a task force to study whether training is even effective in preventing workplace harassment. The study concluded that harassment training, by itself, is not effective, and that it must be a part of a holistic integrative culture strategy to be effective.
In its current form, for most companies, harassment training has been commoditized to an annual or biennial program that is often disconnected from an integrated culture strategy and not seen as adding any value to team dynamics. Even worse, training courses have been reduced to an outright joke in many circles, as illustrated in a recent Saturday Night Live (SNL) parody. Simply put, harassment training by itself isn’t enough.
Harassment training doesn’t prevent harassment. This does
A 2021 study conducted by workplace scholar Joan Williams and her team at UC Hastings College of Law, in conjunction with workplace-culture platform Emtrain, demonstrates why harassment training, by itself, is not effective. Evidence from more than 20,000 employees showed that the real driver of reports of harassment and bias wasn’t whether there had been training. It was whether there was a real sense of inclusion among employees. The research report found that when there is less inclusion, there are more reports of harassment and bias.
When there’s a lack of inclusion, that means there are weak social connections between employees, creating more potential for employee misunderstandings and conflict. The weak social connections also mean there’s less tolerance in the face of misunderstandings and a propensity to assume bad intent rather than just think of a situation as a simple misunderstanding. Take the case of the stolen Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.
When I was an employment lawyer, I conducted more than 1,000 workplace harassment investigations. In one case, a Black employee filed a complaint against his white coworkers after someone had eaten a pint of his Ben & Jerry’s ice cream from the shared office refrigerator. This incident followed times when the white coworkers teased the Black coworker about his sneakers, and multiple times when the white coworkers did not invite the Black coworker to lunch. The Ben & Jerry’s theft was the last straw.
Was this situation rude? Yes. Did the coworkers lack empathy and understanding? Yes. Did the complainant feel excluded and rubbed the wrong way? Yes. Could this also have been a misunderstanding? Absolutely. But because the Black employee had already experienced a lack of inclusion, the Ben & Jerry’s theft seemed to be yet another example. So he filed a complaint.
You see, the vast majority of harassment claims do not reflect Harvey Weinstein-type bad actors who are primarily people in power who abuse their authority for their own sexual benefit. Instead, they reflect situations in which people are thoughtless about the sensitivities of their coworkers, they’re not inclusive, and they say or do something a coworker finds offensive. The coworker then starts to feel uncomfortable with the team dynamics and feels powerless to change the situation. No amount of harassment training by itself will prevent complaints if workers don’t feel that they are in an inclusive environment.
3 ways to prevent harassment
The best way to foster an inclusive workplace, and to actually prevent harassment claims, is through coordination, measurement, and training.
Coordination. Organizations can stand behind their commitment to inclusion by synchronizing their approaches, metrics, and actions across the departments tasked with addressing these issues. Bring employee relations, diversity and inclusion, employee engagement, and harassment teams together.
Measurement. You can’t fix what you don’t measure. We need to measure the nature of attitudes and interactions between people. This comes from regularly pulsing employees for their perception of the environment with questions, such as:
- Do I feel heard?
- Do I feel valued?
- Do my coworkers value personal differences?
- Do I feel comfortable saying “no” to my manager?
- Does my manager address concerns that I raise?
By regularly pulsing employee perceptions of the workplace, it’s possible to identify which teams may have people feeling a lack of belonging or like they are not valued. People leaders who take this approach have a much better chance of identifying growing tensions among employees, and are better equipped to turn those dynamics around before someone files a complaint.
Training. Constant, smart, bite-size, and engaging training provides the positive reinforcement required to learn the inclusion skill. But this kind of training cannot be done in a bubble. It must be done in conjunction with other anti-harassment and diversity efforts.
Harassment training has gotten a bad reputation. And deservedly so. By itself, most harassment training accomplishes little more than fulfilling a regulatory requirement. But when coupled with data-driven and intentional approach to measuring and improving inclusion, people leaders stand a much better chance of decreasing harassment claims, increasing healthy team dynamics, and meeting legal requirements all at the same time.
Janine Yancey is the founder and CEO of Emtrain.
