UK employers urged to rethink harassment training amid quality concerns

Employers are being warned to look beyond simply providing sexual harassment training and consider whether it is actually working. New research reported by People Management reveals that six in ten employers rate their training as no better than adequate, despite more organisations now providing it. With tougher legal duties now in force, the effectiveness of that training is coming under greater scrutiny. So what does effective training look like, and how can employers measure whether it is making a difference? We'll speak to a diversity expert about the practical steps employers can take.
The new duty to take all reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment came into force on 30 October, raising the standard expected of employers. Against that backdrop, the VinciWorks research raises questions about the quality of training being delivered. While more organisations are providing sexual harassment training, six in ten rate it as no better than adequate. The findings also highlight shortcomings in training for managers, who have a particularly important role in recognising and responding to inappropriate behaviour.
The concerns are reinforced by earlier research carried out by Pinsent Masons, published in June. A survey of delegates at our annual Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Conference found that three-quarters had delivered workplace-wide sexual harassment training, but two-thirds relied on e-learning, with only around a third supplementing it with small-group discussions. That raises questions about whether employees are getting enough opportunities to practice handling real workplace situations.
The research also found that 64% had conducted harassment risk assessments. Yet fewer than a quarter had systems in place to monitor whether their training and other preventative measures were effective.
Taken together, the findings highlight a challenge for employers. Training needs to reflect the risks employees face, equip them to respond appropriately and, crucially, make a measurable difference to workplace behaviour.
One approach, that’s working well for a number of our clients, is active bystander training. This is designed to go beyond explaining policies and procedures and uses practical workplace scenarios to help employees recognise harassment, intervene safely, and build the confidence to speak up.
Kieron O'Reilly is a diversity and inclusion consultant with Pinsent Masons' Employment Plus team who has first-hand experience of this and earlier he joined me by video-link to discuss it. So what does active bystander training look like in practice?
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.”
So the message for employers is that harassment training must be tailored to workplace risks and regularly assessed to ensure it is effective. Kieron and the team are currently helping a number of clients review and improve their harassment prevention training. If you would like help with yours then please do contact Kieron – his details are on screen. Alternatively, you can contact your usual Pinsent Masons adviser.