Sexual Harassment Training

No person deserves to experience sexual harassment in the workplace. As an organization, providing sexual harassment training to employees will help prevent sexual assault and the budding of a hostile workplace.

Sexual assault training and harassment training will help employees not only recognize and stop the harassment for themselves, but it will also help them look out for their coworkers. Using an elearning software, like Lessonly, to build sexual assault training materials can well inform employees and you can avoid awkwardly lecturing with sexual assault training scenarios or spending two hours of work time showing sexual assault training videos. Take your sexual assault training from 2015 and your dusty anti-harassment policies and revamp them with elearning. With elearning, you can clarify exactly what harassment in the workplace consists of, how to prevent it, how to report it, and provide methods of coping.

The definition of sexual harassment is the unwelcomeness one feels from the sexual advances received from another. This includes verbal innuendos, jokes, and request for sexual favors. In the workplace, when an employee’s role factors (duties, promotions, assignments, raises, etc.) depend on that employee’s willingness to accept or perform sexual actions, it is also sexual harassment.

Here are some more types of sexual harassment:

Voyeurism – This is the ‘Peeping Tom’ in an environment. This is someone in the workplace who seeks out women or men using the bathroom or changing in a dressing room. With technology today, cyber voyeurism is now possible. For example, someone who hacks into a computer’s camera to watch that person without their knowledge.

Flashers – These are people who show their genitalia to passerbys. It’s highly unlikely to have a flasher in the workplace, but outside of the workplace, employees should know exactly how to report it. As an employer, consider the traumatization that might be involved and offer the victim (your employee) time to adjust.

Obscene digital communication – This includes any kind of communication (phone calls, instant messaging) that an individual uses to make disturbing comments to another individual. This is not restricted to sexual language, but also consists of bullying.

Pornography – Is photos, video, or printed material depicting adults or children with exposed private parts or performing sexual acts. Pornography is absolutely not allowed in the workplace. Firewalls should be constructed for the computer systems to prevent access to any pornographic material on the internet.

Prostitution – The exchange of sexual favors for money.

In addition to recognizing these types of harassment, every employee, especially managers, should learn how to support those who have been victims of harassment.

Even if it doesn’t happen in the workplace, sympathy plays a big role in helping victims get better. To be able to support a victim, one should be able to understand the reactions to harassment, and know how to communicate with a victim. We’ve listed a few of those here:

Immediate reactions – Immediately following harassment of any kind, a person can become very emotional with anger or sadness, and on the opposing end, completely shocked. They may hyperventilate, fear their own personal safety, and fear the reactions of others. It’s not uncommon for victims to be unable to recall what happened if the mind is in a state of immediate suppression.

Subsequent Acute Reactions – A victim of sexual harassment can become overwhelmed with fear and trying to suppress an instance by avoiding and resisting anything that could lead to re-experiencing the trauma. They may even feel as though they are the ones to blame. Victims can become very timid and quiet, getting lost in their own unanswered questions. They can become sick, lose weight, and even use unhealthy methods to cope (drugs, alcohol, etc.).

Long Term Reactions – Long term reactions consist of feelings of shame to full blown depression. Long term victims who don’t seek help can lose trust in other people, feel detached, lose sexual interest, and become very sick emotionally and physically.

The scariest consequence of these reactions is not feeling comfortable communicating or a reporting on harassment. Even with sympathy toward a coworker who has been victimized, learning how to communicate with that person can help them recover from something so traumatic. With Lessonly, you can train on sexual harassment and how to report it, track who has accurately completed the training, and elicit feedback for improvement from learners. For example, if you need to make sure that all the leaders in an organization have taken employee harassment training, you can incorporate quiz questions and open-ended questions that require responses. You can also receive a report each morning to check the progress of each learner. Employers are obligated to train employees on harassment in the workplace or the employer could be held responsible for any harassment that occurs.

Workplace Harassment Training

Outside of sexual harassment training, general harassment in the workplace training will help employees avoid or recognize and solve any harassment conflict. Workplace violence training is a perfect lesson example. That lesson, formatted with Lessonly, could look something like this:

Slide 1 – Workplace harassment prevention – Compose this section of text covering the distinction between what is considered sexual harassment and what isn’t.
Slide 2 – Workplace harassment scenarios – With this slide, you can put the previous slide into context.
Slide 3 – Workplace harassment training powerpoint – If you had a powerpoint presentation previously in your training, and aren’t ready to let it go, with Lessonly, you can upload the presentation right on the platform.
Slide 4 – Workplace harassment training video – A video would be great to reinforce the copy and graphics from previous slides. Lessonly uses widgets to incorporate an array of media from your favorite platforms like Youtube.
Slide 5 – Review/Quiz – Quizzing is crucial with serious subjects such as sexual harassment. You must know that your entire team is well versed on what it is, how to recognize it, and how to report it.

We suggest keeping lessons under 15 minutes and refreshing learners on the information a few times a year. By using a lesson, you can then use in-person training to further elaborate on some workplace harassment training scenarios, if you so choose.

We can’t stress enough how important harassment training is. If you’re not informing your employees of sexual harassment, as an employer, you could end up in a situation in which you’re reliable. You are responsible for your actions, that of your proxies, and those of immediate managers. In addition, it is your duty as an employer to have an anti-discrimination policy in place, take prevention measures, and reduce any harm by all means possible that may have come to an employee.

EEO training

EEO stands for Equal Opportunity Employment. The EEO Commission was established after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to monitor and regulate the protection of employees from discrimination. The EEOC created a training institute for employers to understand, prevent, or correct discrimination in the workplace. The Institute is composed of seminars, conferences, and on-site training covering hostile work environment training from broad discrimination to new changes in the law.

This kind of training, though extremely informative, can result in low-retention. Too much information too fast exhausts the mentality of a learner. When it comes to EEOC training, we recommend spreading out attendance to these events over the course of a few months. In between your lead staff attending these events, you can keep them brushed up by taking content from an EEOC training manual and implementing it into elearning lessons.

To become an EEO investigator (i.e. a person whose sole job is to inquire and investigate harassment in the workplace) you generally have to have a degree in criminal justice or human resources management with some post-grad experience. Once submitting an application, potential EEO investigators have to endure a 32-hour training program through the EEOC Training Institute. Only after EEOC investigator training, can one begin investigating workplace harassment issues.

Though EEO training is common for leaders within an organization, you shouldn’t shy away from training all employees on things like preventing workplace bullying. You can use much of the valuable information EEO provides like eeoc training videos or EEOC training requirements to go by when developing your own online workplace harassment training.

Online Workplace Harassment Training with Lessonly

Employee harassment training online gives your company the opportunity to well-verse employees on what is often times a not-so-easy subject. With elearning, you can use the EEOC training materials to help begin building processes and procedures to avoid and report workplace harassment.

Instead of creating a 90 page harassment and discrimination powerpoint, use eLearning to take advantage of ongoing training methods. Going above and beyond the workplace harassment training requirements will make your entire staff feel more comfortable and aware. With Lessonly, you can do that while simultaneously cutting down on resources significantly. Here’s how:

Lessonly is a digital platform – You can forget what a printer is and save a few trees with Lessonly. Because it’s completely digital, there’s no need to print out copious amounts of training manuals that end up stuffed in a bottom drawer.

Lessonly works with mobile devices – People learn best at a time and place they are completely enveloped with focus. With Lessonly, administrators can assign a due date for a lesson, and learners can take it at their convenience on any computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone with internet access. If your learner has to skip a day of training for a previous commitment, then they’re only skipping out on physical attendance.

Lessonly can track who does what, when, and how well – Take that same learner from above, and ask yourself, “How do I know that the learner has taken the lesson?” Once assigning lessons with Lessonly, you receive a progress report each day to see who has completed the lesson and who still needs to finish the lesson. Furthermore, with quiz, required response, and open-ended questions, you can format questions that test the retention of your employees.

Additionally, with open-ended questions, you can require feedback. Especially with harassment training, answering any and all question that arise ensures the prevention of harassment and creates a more sound workplace environment. Tracking with Lessonly relieves the ambiguity from learning. Instead of assuming your learners have learned, you will know.

Lessonly has streamlined delivery – Administrators can add all learners after implementing Lessonly, and then after that, they no longer have to type in a learner’s email to assign a lesson. With the ‘Groups’ feature, admins can split up learners into sections. For example, say you’ve added the entire staff of your company. You can split up Sales and Marketing so that you never have to individually add learners and you don’t risk assigning the wrong lessons to the wrong people. Lesson sharing is as simple as checking a box! If you need to share a lesson with someone only one time, you can simply copy and paste the lesson link and send it through email or instant messaging! There is a complete lack of logistical stress with Lessonly.

Lessonly makes content creation a breeze – As mentioned previously, all lesson content is created directly on the Lessonly platform. Traditional learning management systems usually require SCORM, which requires content creation outside of the system. Lessonly works with SCORM files, so it’s easy to upload and add files and documents from outside of the platform. If you already have files that need to be transferred over to the platform, it’s as simple as an upload. Lessonly has all the tools you need to create fun, engaging content for your learners.

The ultimate resource saved with Lessonly is time. With the efficient eLearning training that Lessonly makes possible, your team learns better and faster. There’s less time spent on learning logistics which creates more time for performing and innovating. Prepare your team for preventing workplace discrimination. A secure, comfortable, non-hostile work environment enables everyone to focus on doing their best work.