UK employers back ‘active bystander’ training as confidence in harassment prevention falls

Employers are facing a step change in their legal obligations around workplace sexual harassment but gaps in training threaten legal compliance. That’s the conclusion drawn from a study by VinciWorks who questioned 243 HR and compliance professionals about employers’ ability to prevent sexual harassment. They urge employers to review their training programmes immediately to ensure they meet the tougher requirements and protect their employees from harm. We’ll speak to a diversity expert who is helping a number of clients address that risk.

Alongside the duty already in force under the Worker Protection Act to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment, further changes under the Employment Rights Act are now on the horizon. We expect that from April 2026 sexual harassment will be more clearly brought within the whistleblowing regime. Then, from October 2026, the legal test itself tightens again, with employers expected to show they have taken all reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment, including harassment by third parties.

But the research raises serious questions about preparedness. It shows 49% of those surveyed are not confident their employer can prevent sexual harassment at work. 21% say their organisation provides no sexual harassment training at all. And even where training exists, confidence in its quality is low: 26% rated it as only “okay” or “not good”, while just 13% described it as excellent. And as expectations on prevention rise, that gap matters. Training is no longer a peripheral issue; it is increasingly central to whether employers can demonstrate compliance with the law. So, having some form of training in place may no longer be enough. As the law moves towards a requirement to take all reasonable steps, employers will be judged more closely on whether their training is effective, proportionate, and capable of influencing behaviour in practice.

That is where active bystander training is gaining traction. Unlike traditional harassment training, which often focuses on definitions, policies and reporting routes, active bystander training concentrates on what happens in the moment. It is designed to help people recognise problematic behaviour as it arises, understand why intervention can feel difficult, and practise realistic ways of stepping in safely and appropriately.

So what does active bystander training actually look like in practice and who is it aimed at? Earlier, I spoke to diversity expert Kieron O’Reilly from Pinsent Masons’ D&I consultancy, Brook Graham, and I put that question to him:

Kieron O’Reilly: “So the audience - we tailor it for, from top to bottom - from board impact to senior leaders and execs right down to all levels of the organisation. What does it look like? Well, that's based on the organisation itself. This training is quite unique in as much as we spend quite a bit of time with what we call familiarisation. So we really need to know the environment, how the organisation operates, and we need to know about job family so that we have got a really good understanding of the organisation and the people who will be attending, and then we build the course from it. What typically you will see in a course like this is there is an element of legal because it's really important that people know where this is coming from, but we don't go into the legal bits in any heavy form. What we do want to make sure of is making it absolutely clear what harassment is because it's one of those words that we find, when we do this training, people have many different understandings of what it means. If you're going to spot harassment, including sexual harassment, you need to know what the definitions are. So we really focus on that first. Once that's understood and you got a bit of a foundation to work from, we go through a range of engagement exercises to work through, practicing what that might actually look like. So we give small case scenarios to get to grips with harassment and from there the next point that's really important is then to recognise what harassment looks like. So we go through a range of scenarios so people get to understand what it looks like and we have what we call the four Ds and the five Fs. So the five Fs are about recognising the different responses individuals have in a situation when they're being harassed and we do that so people can recognise it. Everyone really wants to do a good thing. You know, if they if you ask people in a room, if you see harassment will you do something about it, pretty much everyone's going to put their hand up but when it really happens, when the crunch comes, it's hard to be certain and be confident. So the purpose of going through the idea of this is what trauma responses are - in other words, how people respond to harassment - creates that confidence. Once you spot it, what do you do about it? So the next thing we do with the training is the different forms of intervention techniques. There are a range of them. Not everyone is comfortable to call it out, as they say, when it happens but there are other ways to do it that allows people to do so safely and we go through those. Once that's embedded, we go into some quite challenging case scenarios that are set up completely around the environment that people would work in, and that will vary. So for example, with a corporate team that I was working with recently for a very large energy provider it was all about their environment, their world of work, and then part of the training was then altered slightly for those who are working out in the field such as gas fitters and electricians and then, obviously, slightly different for those who are working in debt collection. In other words, it has really shaped the scenarios into what their real world looks like, and then we put them in a bit of discomfort, but the benefit there is that they get to practice how to recognise, how to intervene, and how to report it safely, whilst it not being real and that gives people a massive amount of comfort to go through what is an uncomfortable situation, but then to do so in a way that they feel safe to do it and from what we've seen so far, people are responding very, very positively from it and it's one of the reasons we're seeing reporting increasing in the organisations we're working with.”

Joe Glavina: “So how do you know it's working, Kieron?” 

Kieron O’Reilly: “Excellent question, because this is one of those really important things that it's not just about getting the value for the investment you place in it, but is it actually having an impact, is it reducing harassment via the techniques put in place? So the very typical one is we start with a very simple benchmark. We look at the types of reporting that has already been done, we look at the nature of them, and we look at the sort of trends of them. What we then put in place is a process whereby we will measure from there on, for the next three years, what the reporting looks like and that is, obviously, quite intense in that very first year that we do it. We expect there to be a pattern which would be an increase across the first year, a plateau, potentially, against the second, and then we would see it starting to decrease in the third and, as you can imagine, you'd expect to see an increase because people are feeling safe and trust the process to do the reporting. Again, it's not a great thing that people have something to report, but it is important because it is there, and it does happen, and often goes unreported. As that carries on, we really hope to see that it plateaus, and that's as we start to see the behavioural change going in and then, of course, as that manages over time we'll see it decrease. So that's a pattern that we put against it. So, we start with that very first trend. The next areas of measurement that people are looking at is a period of measurements of the people who attend the training. So there is an impact assessment that's done in the training itself. So someone will come in, and it's a bit of a confidence gauge of to how they feel about recognising reporting harassment, and then it's gauged at the end. It is then gauged again in three months’ time where there's a survey done to understand if people have seen any changes or differences and how confident they feel. Then there's a further one done at the nine-month period which organisations are using to look at how people are feeling about their confidence and what difference that has made. So all of those measures going together and then dependent on whether you do employee surveys in other areas, you can correlate those across, as well as data points, and all of those come together as measures to see what behavioural change is happening. The most important one, though, is the qualitative side. It’s simply asking people, and that's what comes up in the surveys and, so far, we've seen a very positive response where people are feeling confident to talk about the issues behind harassment, talk about harassment itself, and it's gone beyond that. These conversations are now opening up intergenerationally, where people are feeling more able to talk to each other on a range of topics. So it's not just harassment that we're measuring here, we're also measuring how people feel from their team dynamics, and that's been quite a powerful behavioural change in those organisations we’ve been working with.”

If you think this type of training might benefit your organisation then please do reach out to Kieron – his details are there on the screen for. Alternatively, of course, you can contact your usual Pinsent Masons adviser.