Employers looking to establish anti-harassment compliance training programs might not know how to go about it.
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) recently released the findings of a select task force on the study of harassment in the workplace.
The report makes the following recommendations regarding anti-harassment compliance training:
* Employers should offer, on a regular basis and in a universal manner, compliance trainings that include the content and follow the structural principles described in this report, and which are offered on a dynamic and repeated basis to all employees.
* Employers should dedicate sufficient resources to train middle management and first-line supervisors on how to respond effectively to observed harassment, that is reported to them, or of which they have knowledge or information — even before such harassment reaches a legally-actionable level.
* EEOC should, as a best practice in cases alleging harassment, seek as a term of its settlement agreements, conciliation agreements, and consent decrees, that employers adopt and maintain compliance training that comports with the content and follows the structural principles described in this report.
* Groups of employers should consider coming together to offer researchers access to their workplaces to research the effectiveness of trainings, particularly in the context of holistic harassment prevention efforts, in a manner that would allow research data to be aggregated and not identify individual employers.
