Sexual harassment training in the workplace
Published
February 27, 2025
Author
Share
To keep your workplace harassment-free, it’s important to educate your teams on sexual harassment and acceptable behaviors. With the widespread issue of sexual harassment in the workplace, taking proactive steps to eliminate harassment creates a safe space while enhancing morale and organizational culture.
Discover how to implement sexual harassment training in your workplace with this comprehensive guide. Learn more about who should participate, which key topics to include, and what valuable insights can help create a safer, more respectful work environment.
What is sexual harassment training?
Sexual harassment training is designed to educate employees on what sexual harassment is, how to recognize it, and what steps to take if they experience or witness it in the workplace. During training, they learn about the various forms of sexual harassment, including unwanted advances, inappropriate comments, and even jokes with a sexual theme.
The training also covers the impact of this behavior on the victims and the workplace as a whole. It also typically talks about company policies, legal definitions, and real-life scenarios while encouraging open dialogue. Ultimately, its goal is to foster a culture of respect and support while highlighting that everyone plays a role in preventing it.
Who must undergo sexual harassment training?
While laws regarding sexual harassment in the workplace vary across countries and states, they share the common goal of creating a safe and respectful atmosphere for your teams. These laws encourage accountability and establish mechanisms for addressing and preventing harassment.
Depending on where you are and your company’s internal policies, sexual harassment training is typically a must for most employees regardless of their position. This helps guarantee that everyone understands what constitutes harassment and the ways to prevent it.
Training is also crucial for people in leadership roles as they need to know how to handle complaints and support their team effectively. Similarly, HR staff undergo specialized sexual harassment training as they not only manage complaints but implement policies related to harassment.
To stay on top of compliance and meet all the requirements, be sure to review the local laws and regulations regarding workplace harassment training specific to your country or state.
Why should you train on sexual harassment prevention?
Apart from fostering a positive work environment, you’ll reap many benefits from investing in sexual harassment prevention training, including:
- Creating a safer workplace: Training reduces the likelihood of harassment incidents. This means that employees feel safer and respected in their work environment.
- Increasing awareness: It helps teams recognize inappropriate behavior and understand its impacts within and beyond the workplace.
- Encouraging reporting: The right training fosters an open culture where employees are encouraged to report harassment without fear of retaliation.
- Reducing legal risks: Mitigate legal risks and liabilities, including costly legal fees, by committing to preventing harassment with training.
- Enhancing team morale: As training boosts your teams’ respect for one another, morale goes up and productivity improves.
- Fostering inclusivity: Training helps create a more inclusive workplace by addressing harassment. This helps guarantee that all employees feel valued and supported.
How to develop effective sexual harassment training for employees
If you’re unsure of where to start in planning your sexual harassment training, here's a list of tips and best practices to help guide the process:
Know the laws
At the outset, it’s important to familiarize yourself with the laws and regulations on sexual harassment as these will serve as the backbone of your training. Requirements can vary depending on location, so make sure to consult local, state, or federal agencies and resources in the early stages of planning.
It’s also crucial to guarantee that your training aligns with your company’s sexual harassment policy. This is essential to make sure that all corporate training courses reflect the organization’s values and procedures. Misalignment can also lead to confusion about handling cases, leading to inconsistent disciplinary actions or failure to address serious issues.
Tailor content to the specific needs of your organization
In determining what you want to achieve with training, keep in mind that you should consider the specific needs of your organization. Sexual harassment training should be customized for different departments, job levels, and scenarios.
It should also consider the demographics of your teams. Make sure that it’s culturally appropriate and relevant to the diversity of your workforce.
Engage employees early
The involvement of your teams is crucial to the success of training. Gather their input early on in the planning phase. Their insights are important as they help tailor the sexual harassment training to address specific workplace dynamics and make sure that it's relevant to everyone.
Engaging employees also assures them that their voices are important in this conversation. It helps them understand that the workplace fosters a safe and inclusive environment where they can share concerns and ask questions.
Develop interactive content
Reinforce learning by incorporating interactive activities into your training. This could include role-playing, discussions, and quizzes that engage your teams actively. You should also use real-life examples and case studies to paint a clearer picture of what harassment is and how it can impact others.
Some elearning platforms offer free online harassment training for employees. These are valuable resources that help you cut time and save budget compared to when you create a training entirely from scratch.
SC Training (formerly EdApp) houses features that help make training more digestible and engaging for employees. Its gamification feature helps teams tap, swipe, and drag their way through training. SC Training’s Discussions also allow your teams to exchange information and insights no matter where they are easily.
Conduct training sessions regularly
Sexual harassment training isn’t a one-and-done thing. It should be given at several key points so that employees stay aware and informed:
- During onboarding
- Refresher courses annually or as required by law
- When policies change
- After an incident or complaint
- When there are role changes, especially for managers, supervisors, or HR
It’s easy to automate compliance training with SC Training’s recurring courses, course versioning, and real-time reporting. This feature allows you to only set up repeated training once and watch completions roll in when your team is notified that it’s time to retake training.
Focus on bystander intervention
Empower employees by encouraging them to intervene whenever they see inappropriate and unwelcome behavior. Emphasize the importance of stepping in when they witness harmful incidents.
In talking about bystander intervention, it’s crucial to tackle the how. There are many ways that bystanders can intervene depending on the situation. They can redirect the situation, delegate it to someone with more authority, or directly approach the person involved. Regardless, it’s important to emphasize that they should also think of their own safety when deciding how to act.
It’s also important to give employees the resources they need to report what happened, clearly outline the steps involved, and inform them about and whom to contact.
Recommended sexual harassment training courses
SC Training offers a collection of sexual harassment training courses for the workplace. These are customized to align with the unique requirements of each state or country, helping you comply with applicable laws and regulations.
Sexual Harassment in the Workplace (AU)
SC Training partnered with global law firm Clyde & Co to create this workplace sexual harassment prevention course that’s designed for Australian employees. It begins with defining what constitutes sexual harassment and lists down the different employee obligations and psychosocial hazards.
The course also tackles the effects of workplace sexual harassment and offers useful strategies for prevention. Its final lessons discuss how to respond to harassment and why workers must act honestly and in good faith when it comes to allegations of sexual harassment.
Sexual Harassment in the Workplace (UK)
Teaming up with UK employment law firm Halborns, SC Training designed this course to help UK employees understand how to prevent and address workplace sexual harassment. It offers strategies for creating a safe and respectful workplace and answers how you can deal with inappropriate behavior and prevent sexual harassment at work.
USA Harassment Prevention
SC Training and Polsinelli joined forces to create several courses that meet the legal requirements for the majority of states in the USA. Catering to both employees and supervisors, these courses outline the expected behaviors to foster a respectful, harassment-free workplace. Check them out here:
Some courses, on the other hand, give a more in-depth and extensive discussion of workplace harassment in the context of specific states:
Commit to respect and equality with sexual harassment training. Join SC Training today!
Author
Bea Garcia
Bea Garcia is a content writer for SC Training (formerly EdApp), a cutting-edge e-learning platform designed to democratize training. Beyond her writing desk, she spends her time trying out recipes and watching films.