As cultural demands create new levels of accountability for behavior in the workplace, regulations and laws designed to protect workers from harassment are appearing in early-adopting states.
These early adopters include California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, and New York, but we anticipate many states following suit and creating their own standards for anti-harassment measurements.
Inevitably, these regulations involve a great deal of training, and for many training managers, ensuring full compliance with anti-harassment regulations can be quite overwhelming.
We’ve now helped a number of our clients prepare for upcoming regulations and have a little insight to share about the best ways to prepare for state-specific compliance regulations.
Here’s our strategy guide for preparing for new anti-harassment compliance laws!
Start With Knowing the Laws
The best thing you can do to prepare for new regulations is to understand every detail, and how the regulations will affect your workplace. We’ve compiled this chart for current state-specific regulations – knowing the laws is a good place to start.
Anti-Harassment Requirements by State
California – Supervisor training and training for individual contributors
Connecticut – Anti-harassment training for all employees
Delaware – Anti-harassment training for all employees
Illinois – A minimum of one training event each year addressing harassment in the workplace
Maine – Anti-harassment training for all employees
New York – Annual anti-harassment training with a focus on interactivity
New York City – Anti-harassment training for all employees
Starting with the law is important – each law has a unique date to go into effect and failing to prepare for this date ahead of time may leave you scrambling to get caught up!
A Training Partner Can Help You Prepare
The reality for companies is that preparing for anti-harassment laws can be incredibly difficult – in California, employers are required to provide two hours of sexual harassment training to supervisors – and few companies are equipped to produce two hours of training that meets other regulatory specifications.
In states where regulatory demands are complex and legal penalties are severe, companies relying on internal sources for anti-harassment training are taking on tremendous risk.
A better solution, in many cases, is working with a partner who aggregates and creates reliable training content – a company that specializes in anti-harassment is far better equipped to offer proper, effective training.
Here at BizLibrary, we have training lessons that meet regulatory standards for state-specific learning, and because of our relationship with more than 40 producer partners, as well as our own in-house production studio, we can quickly and reliably find or create new content that meets state-specific regulatory standards.
When you partner with a content provider, you can rely on that partner to provide credible anti-harassment training so you can focus on delivering – and not creating – training.
Audit-Proof Your Training with Robust Reporting
Video learning offers a host of benefits to training administrators, and among them is the automated nature of tracking and reporting on training.
With instructor-led training, reporting must be done manually, and measuring effectiveness is difficult.
With video-based training, you can easily create learning assignments and track completion. Considering regulations like California’s calling for training to be completed within 90 days of hire, being able to pull a report to prove your compliance is invaluable.
Furthermore, if a harassment incident does occur in your workplace, when employees recognize that you take anti-harassment seriously and are committed to staying compliant, they’re recognizing that harassment incidents aren’t systemic at your organization.
Finally, company culture has a strong relationship with your commitment to compliance. Creating a welcoming culture with a zero-tolerance policy towards harassment and discrimination will reduce incidents and lower risk.
Reinforce Training to Protect Your Employees
While it’s true that many companies are implementing anti-harassment training in response to state-specific regulations, it’s also true that these training events will protect your workers, and ultimately, keeping employees safe by lowering the risk of harassment will always pay off for your organization.
In this regard, treat this training event like you would any other where you want to see legitimate behavior changes.
That means using best practices for your training process – and that must include post-training reinforcement.
An easy but effective method to ensure you are reinforcing training after the event is to implement tests. Testing immediately following a learning event can increase learning retention by as much as 40%.
However you choose to reinforce training, as long as you are doing it, you should see greater success in your training efforts.
Anti-harassment training is important, and even if you’re not one of the states affected by mandatory regulations, in this climate, where employees are more empowered to fight harassment, it’s a good idea to consider revamping your own employee training strategies.
BizLibrary’s content is thoroughly researched and vetted before entering our library, so you can be sure your organization’s anti-harassment training needs are in good hands.
To learn more about how we source and create training content for our award-winning library, check out this quick guide to our content curation process.