Revolutionizing Compliance Training

How Self-Reflection and Diagnosis Can Help Prevent Sexual Harassment in the Workplace

 

There are two types of corporate training. One type revolves around teaching employees how to perform their duties to the best of their ability, and the other revolves around teaching employees how to respect workplace culture. As the former tends to result in increased productivity and profit, that’s where training resources inevitably end up. However, as the staggering amount of sexual misconduct in the workplace continues to be reported, it’s clear that our professional climate is in need of compliance training that will not only positively impact a company’s performance, but will make the workplace a safer, more inviting place for employees to do what they do best.

We’ve long been overdue for an overhaul when it comes to sexual harassment training—studies have shown that, over the past 30 years, sexual harassment training has failed to properly educate employees about a wide variety of topics that are necessary for a workplace free of toxic misconduct.

Moving forward, it’s time to invest in sexual harassment training that works, and, contrary to popular belief, such training is well-within our grasp. Compliance training is designed to teach employees how to maintain a professional workplace, but such training almost always fails because the approach doesn’t establish a connection between the learner and the content. Without actively placing the learner in a scenario to consider how their actions affect their performance, the learner may focus on what they deem as relevant and ignore aspects of the larger picture. We have seen how actions such as sexual harassment grow out of control because the ethical aspect of the job has been either covered at a minimum, or the importance has been marginalized since the employee hasn’t properly considered the wider scope of their actions.

Employees need a way to reflect upon their behaviors and consider how their attitudes align with the company culture as a whole. With the growing scrutiny on cases of sexual harassment, companies need to start realizing the importance of the sexual harassment aspects of their compliance training. Essentially, sexual harassment training needs to focus on the complexities of the issue while staying focused on the human aspect of those complexities. It’s a tricky process, but here at AllenComm, we’ve developed a tool to help bolster compliance training regardless of the industry.

Break the Cycle with Reflection

Our team of L&D professionals have developed a training tool that can function as both a diagnostic method for isolating potentially harmful attitudes, and as a multi-faceted lens with which employees can view harassment from several different perspectives. We call it the Core Ethics Reflection Tool, and it’s a great way to enhance compliance training.

First, the tool allows your employee to consider their response(s) to a variety of questions. It lets employees consider their own feelings along with how their feelings relate to what is considered acceptable/unacceptable behavior from professional, personal, and legal standpoints. Second, the tool will show a representation of how the attitudes of the individual compare with the rest of their values. A decrease in one field will show a greater emphasis in another, and vice versa. By being able to look at a graphic representation, it elaborates just how strongly an employee feels about particular behaviors at work.

A Tool to Revolutionize Sexual Harassment Training

The tool also functions as more than just a means to promote intrapersonal awareness: the Core Ethics Reflection Tool helps place the focus on the victims of harassment and helps generate a more sympathetic understanding regarding how their attitudes affect the feelings of others. This is important to illustrate when designing compliance training, especially when it comes to an anti-harassment policy, but could be adapted to other trainings, such as safety or security.

As a part of your company’s HR Team, you could use the Core Ethics Reflection Tool to then compare the findings you have collected from your employees and recognize the trends within your company. With the data gathered from a series of anonymously submitted responses, you will be able to recognize and address the concerns head on. This process helps promote honest feedback from your staff while identifying potentially dangerous trends that exist within your workforce. From there, you will be able to carefully examine your findings and see just how well your company is performing, and you can use the tool again in the future and compare results.

If the Core Ethic Reflection Tool is something you’re interested in exploring and learning more about, please contact AllenComm for a consultation today.