It seems it’s not a complete day nowadays without a big company or famous person being outed for sexual harassment. More frequently, people are being compelled to come forth with their stories of abuse, and as good as this appears, it makes one wonder: how do you stop this from happening again in the future? There’s always sexual harassment training, but unless you have the following three components, it’s unlikely to produce any actual results.
A Clear, Defined Policy
The best place to start is, of course, a solid foundation, which in this case is a clearly defined policy against sexual harassment. This policy needs to be made explicitly clear to all of your workers, male or female, to make sure they understand from the start, both the stance the company takes on sexual harassment and the consequences of it. Otherwise, no training will do any good.
Provide Realistic Examples
The person performing this training and educating employees should ideally be an individual who has experienced sexual harassment in the past and has educated themselves in its various other forms. This way, the individual can provide realistic examples to those undergoing the training and make sure the examples provided are realistic and something the employees may actually experience themselves so they know how to handle it. It’s important to make the examples as realistic as possible in order to avoid the pitfall of individuals seeing those who commit sexual harassment as cartoon characters because then they won’t notice when real, flawed humans commit it in real life.
Make It Interactive
Humans tend to learn more easily when they’re given the chance to directly interact with the material. When it comes to sexual harassment training, you need to make sure your employees are directly interfacing with the material for maximum understanding. This could mean large group training or interactive computer modules. Whichever way you deem to be the most effective means to present the material should be implemented, but it needs to be interactive. Otherwise, those receiving the training will do what they typically did in their college lectures and tune it out. This is not something you want to happen so make sure the material is directly confronting the recipient.
To learn more about effective sexual harassment training, visit this website to learn more information.
