All employees should feel safe to work, learn, and grow. However, workplace harassment can eliminate your employees’ sense of comfort and safety at work. This harrowing experience might forever tarnish otherwise their positive experiences and memories in your company.
Every employer and manager have the responsibility to ensure team members are safe from these kinds of threats and harm. One way to do this is to conduct online harassment training. Unfortunately, it can be a challenge to ensure engagement during these kinds of virtual training.
This article provided some tips on how you can shape your sexual harassment training to encourage engagement and boost its effectiveness.
If your business is based in New York City or nearby areas and you’re looking for a reliable online harassment training provider, there are a lot of reliable institutions you can reach out to. They usually offer interactive sexual harassment education and additional training for employees. This course training meets the compliance requirements from all 50 states, including New York State and California.
1. Ditch Theories And Focus On Real-Life Stories
Most businesses’ human resources departments might make the mistake of simply discussing the boring, theoretical instances of workplace harassment. For instance, they tend to empathize with the rules and guidelines in place, but don’t explain any relatable or real-life applications.
Employees need to be aware of how this annual training ties into their professional lives and work duties. So, if you’re comfortable with it, you can focus more on giving real-life stories or personal anecdotes to reveal what it is like to experience that offensive behavior.
After all, the power of storytelling is one of the best ways to engage people. A good story can connect with people on an emotional level and actually holds their attention as certain scenarios unfold.
Of course, you shouldn’t name names. You should simply highlight experiences from the past to help connect with employees.
Behavior-based harassment training can humanize your topics through relevant examples and stories, motivating employees to reflect upon their conduct and think of what they can do to make positive changes.
2. Include Scenario-Based Examples
Sharing real-life experiences may be limited. So, if you can, you should also include scenario-based examples of what workplace harassment looks like.
Most harassment training includes videos where actors portray the scenarios. That said, unless you have the resources to have a professional-level video production available or to hire actors, it may be better to stick with written scenarios.
Unrealistic or campy video examples can actually make it look like a joke and reduce the seriousness with which employees view the training. This can result in not fully understanding the gravity of the issue.
3. Incorporate VR
Latest technological innovation like virtual reality has provided valuable benefits in several sectors, especially in the training industry.
If you have the budget, you can incorporate VR as you include scenario-based examples in your sexual harassment prevention training to boost employee engagement. This can also help employees understand the purpose of such coaching better.
Employee training sessions can include using digital VR goggles to immerse learners in a 3D world where they are subjected to different scenarios—whether they watch a co-worker experience harassment or their digital character experiencing it ‘firsthand.’
This allows employees to learn how to identify and respond to sexual harassment in the workplace when it’s happening to someone else. Also, it can teach employees how to react if it ever happens to them.
Perhaps the greatest benefit of incorporating VR instead of simply explaining it is that the scenario can feel authentic and organic. Users will be prompted with suggested responses to a situation. The story would then unfold depending on what response they make or how long they react.
4. Encourage Safe Discussion and Collaboration
Workplace harassment training is often done in teams. This helps promote a culture of openness and trust among employees which can help enhance their engagement levels.
Encouraging your employees to discuss these issues and achieve the training goals and outcomes can increase interest in the harassment prevention training program and create more favorable conditions for active participation.
You can also introduce collaborative activities that can cultivate their ability to work effectively with one another. Through this, you can promote knowledge and experience sharing. These activities can help drive toward a common goal and encourage the creation of solutions that will benefit everyone and the company as a whole.
That said, workplace harassment is a sensitive topic. So, you must create a safe space where employees can openly discuss these topics. Make sure to include a moderator to control passionate conversations and debates because tempers can flare.
You don’t want an online anti-harassment training discussion to become a new harassment platform. After all, in such situations, particularly online, people often attack each other with the excuse of “just being honest.”
Conclusion
Every business has the responsibility to maintain a workplace that’s free from any kind of harassment. Training your employees is a cost effective and valuable way of minimizing and preventing workplace harassment issues. Making sure your workers receive training will help make your company a safer, more positive workplace for everyone.
To ensure effective online anti-harassment training, make sure to follow the above tips in keeping employees engaged, allowing them to be inspired to implement what they’ve learned into their lives. Establish workplace harassment prevention as compliance training. Ensure that the online training you acquire is compliant with federal and state training requirements and other local laws. You should also take any sexual harassment complaints and other grievances that may reach your knowledge seriously.
Author Bio: This article is written by our marketing team at HR Cloud. HR Cloud is a leading provider of HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee engagement, and intranet software. Our aim is to help your company improve employee engagement, employee productivity, and to save you valuable time!
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