Business Reporter – Management – A new approach in sexual harassment awareness training

As businesses evolve in an era dominated by both digitalization and increased demands for environmental and social sustainability, the challenge of managing the human aspects of change can seem overwhelming.

It is often emphasized that selecting and deploying the right technology is only half the story, and that changing the mindset of the workforce is an essential criterion for any transformation project.

But no matter what mindset organizations want to change, the tools remain the same: good, old-fashioned training programs are still at the top of the checklist when it comes to raising awareness about an issue that has been overlooked or needs to be addressed differently. .

Companies have been using training for years to make employees aware of cyber risks or to prevent them from becoming victims of social engineering. Diversity and inclusion courses have also been important exercises, with more than 56 percent of UK companies in a global survey offering DEI training.

Training initiatives can often be given a boost by legal action, or the threat thereof. Criminal cases can reveal employees’ lack of awareness or tendency to look the other way in the most drastic way. When the horrific story of McDonald’s failure to discover that modern slavery had infiltrated its ranks for years was revealed, supply chain experts called for more effective training to enable colleagues to report unethical labor practices.

But while the number of mandatory training programs that employees must complete, as well as the number of training programs that serve their professional development, is increasing, there are some disturbing statistics about their effectiveness.

For example, the 2024 McKinsey Women in the Workplace 10th Anniversary report found that “the workplace for women has not improved, despite some progress.” Groundbreaking research and recent tribunals and court cases on sexual harassment in the workplace also suggest that current prevention methods and procedures are not effective.

What the McKinsey study found was that, after sexual harassment training, “the representation of white women in management will decline by more than 5 percent in the coming years.” The research also found a growing tendency among male participants who had just completed training to blame victims for putting them in harm’s way.

How preventive sense of duty raises the bar

The McKinsey report’s findings, despite being made a few years ago, are still of particular importance today, with the Worker Protection Act set to come into force in Britain on October 26.

This amendment to the Equality Act 2010 is intended to achieve better results in tackling the problem by requiring employers – regardless of their size, sector or circumstance – to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace.

To give the legislation more force, the law also includes a provision that damages in sexual harassment claims will be increased by 25 percent if the employment tribunal finds that the employer has not fulfilled this preventive duty.

If no action is taken to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) – a non-departmental public body established by the Equality Act 2006 – can take enforcement action against the employer, regardless of whether his negligence has led to a current case.

It remains to be seen whether these sanctions will be enough to push preventive duties higher on employers’ agendas. A recent survey by employment law and HR consultancy WorkNest found that a few weeks before the law came into effect, only 5 percent of responding employers could say they were well prepared to meet the new requirements and 58 percent said that they still need to do some work to comply.

New approaches to sexual harassment awareness training

Under pressure from upcoming legislation, it will obviously be tempting for some companies to comply with the proactive employer duty by resorting to ticking the boxes. However, stricter supervision can also be seen as an opportunity to explore how training in preventing and reporting sexual harassment can lead to its reduction.

The McKinsey report cites the ‘forbidden behavior’ approach to traditional training as the main barrier to delivering the right messages to participants. Rather than constantly reminding employees in positions of power of their own potential to be sexual predators—an approach that won’t win anyone over—encouraging and reinforcing positive behavior patterns can make trainees more receptive.

Witnesses to sexual harassment in the workplace also play an important role. As the aforementioned modern slavery incident demonstrated, violations of human dignity can occur over extended periods of time because onlookers choose not to come forward and talk about what they saw. That means providing guidance to employees, not only as potential victims, but also as bystanders, could be the key to better reporting.

If those who notice signs of harassment – ​​sexual or otherwise – have a professional in their department or HR to point out, troubling behavior can be nipped in the bud before irreparable damage is done.

The new amendment may also provide an opportunity to assess how sexual harassment training fits into the broader learning and development picture. In a company, silos exist not only between functions and databases, but also in terms of training programs.

As Dr. Virginia Fisher and Dr. Sue Kinsey of the University of Plymouth note, efforts to reduce sexual harassment cannot succeed without evaluating and making necessary changes to the factors that shape a company’s power dynamics. In this regard, DEI, general anti-harassment and anti-bullying training, and even cybersecurity training can be considered as different modules of cultural and behavioral training, folding sexual harassment into the general framework of training in awareness about harassment and bullying. To combat training fatigue, HR departments would do well to integrate these modules so that the content of the individual courses can reinforce each other’s message.

In the case of sexual harassment, programs to raise employee awareness of company policies and codes of conduct in areas such as dress code, conflicts of interest, use of social media, and business conduct at company events can also serve as evidence that HR and, by extension, employers are playing a proactive role in tackling this problem.

There is no denying that employers have a lot of work ahead of them with the new amendment. Even more so because they have to perform a complex act while trying to balance their extensive duty of care with the need to create a warm, supportive corporate culture based on trust. And they will need to take decisive but cautious steps, because too much corporate interference in employee interactions could be disastrous.

For the EHRC’s technical guidance on sexual harassment in the workplace, click here.