Buy-in From Leadership

Before designing your training program, you’ll need to make sure the entire leadership team is on the same page about tone and content, and you must secure a budget for deploying the training. Use the skills of persuasion presented in Chapter 8 to make an indisputable case for why your training ideas are a necessary component to achieve a healthy culture and why the ROI will be good for the company.

Collect and Analyze Information

Collect any information you have; it could be in the form of hard data or anecdotal information.

Hard data might include:

• A chart showing the history of complaints received, the types received, and tracking whether the resolution of those complaints has alleviated issues.
  • The number of complaints received might show a pattern. Have you received more and more complaints over the years? Fewer complaints? About the same over a period of time?
  • Numbers aren’t enough. Can you correlate any changes (an increase or decrease) to a tangible event—perhaps more complaints after a campaign to advertise your hotline, or after providing training that tells employees that you want to hear from them? Or perhaps fewer complaints after a well-known investigation resulted in no action taken against someone who behaved badly, perhaps sending a message that complaining is futile?
  • Does your tracking show other important patterns? For example, perhaps the vast majority of complaints are about a particular type of issue (sexual harassment, bullying, unfairness in evaluations) making it clear that employees and managers need to learn more about these topics. Or perhaps they spike at one point and decrease at others. Or maybe the allegations are almost always against new managers, perhaps indicating a need for more training for that population.
• Other data that shows trends to guide you on what you need to include in your training program. Maybe data from an engagement survey or from a summary of exit interviews.

Anecdotal data might include comments you’ve heard. For example, I sometimes spoke with employees who told me in no uncertain terms that they felt their voice was not really heard by management. They would agree to speak with me for my investigation and would speak openly and candidly, but would also tell me they expected nothing to happen. These types of comments (or if you’re lucky, positive comments) will help guide you to better plan what you need to highlight in your training.

Coordinate Training Efforts

Coordinate your training efforts to make sure they align with the other work you’re doing to improve your workplace culture. For example, make sure there is a consistent message between policies and training. And, of course, make sure you’re authentic and consistent when it comes to reporting and resolving claims of misconduct.

Methodology

The first order of business is deciding whether to design our own training, hire consultants to provide live training, engage with an e-learning company to provide online training, or opt for a combination of these choices. This decision will mostly be based on your employee population size and whether you’re planning to train all your employees, or only a subset.

Who to Train

I highly encourage organizations to train ALL employees, especially on the topics of harassment prevention, respect, inclusion, and communication. Design a program that clearly distinguishes between illegal behavior and behavior that might be objectionable but isn’t unlawful. And provide communication tools for employees and managers to address low-level drama long before it reaches the point of illegality. A great tool to incorporate is Emtrain’s Workplace Color Spectrum (as discussed in Chapter 8).

Prioritize Order

Prioritizing the order in which you’ll roll out training is critical.  You need to be sure to start with topics you know need the most attention. Perhaps you’ll start with a focus on issues related to communicating clearly and precisely, because you’ve identified that issue as an underlying cause of much of your workplace drama. Or maybe you’ve identified unconscious bias as the root that needs to be addressed before moving on to another topic. Use the information you’ve collected to make these decisions and it will make your training program impactful and relevant.

Other Topics

Address training topics (and populations) that are critical in your quest to have a drama-free workplace. For example, make sure that those who are tasked with receiving complaints, conducting investigations, and implementing measures to address drama are well versed on how best to do their job. And I don’t mean a training session entitled “How to Make Your Investigations Bulletproof at Trial.” This type of session only addresses the legal obligations and doesn’t help investigators learn to sharpen the skills that are vital for their job. This includes developing curiosity, addressing any biases they might have so they can be truly impartial, developing a methodology for investigating that is equal parts structured and flexible, and honing interview and analysis skills to make it easier to find out the truth in all investigations.

What Is Legally Required?

Yes, in some cases you’ll have to check some compliance boxes. But don’t stop there. Even if you’re required to cover certain topics, weave in helpful learning lessons that are about the larger issue of respect so that the message is that compliance is a goal, but not the singular or most important goal.

Other Topics to Cover

Did your research uncover hot spots that need to be addressed? For example, you might know that managers have a hard time giving honest feedback and you’ve seen that this deficiency can lead to claims of unfairness. That means incorporating the how and why of evaluations is critical (or perhaps developing and deploying a separate course on evaluations). Or maybe your company has a long-standing tradition of not enforcing policies, or of selective enforcement. This is an opportunity to design content that not only addresses the need to be consistent, but also provides tangible tools for how that’s achieved.

This step also allows you to map out supplemental content. What type of skills training should you prioritize? Once employees complete formal harassment prevention training, what other content should you develop? If you see that employees are afraid to intervene when they see bad behavior, teach them ways to do so. If you know that retaliation has been an issue in the past, create a micro lesson on that. If you’ve noticed that many in your organization lack emotional intelligence and know that’s at the root of a significant percentage of your workplace conflict, then research and recommend books on EQ, along with a list of thoughtful questions about the content, for department managers to use.

Other Preliminary Issues

This is also the step during which you need to ask yourself a tough question: Do you have the internal team to develop this type of content, or should you look for help from the outside? (Or maybe another question is: Do you need to beef up your training team with more professionals who can develop content with this level of focus and detail?)

Make sure you develop material that is written in English, not legalese. Yes, the definition of unlawful harassment includes technical language, but break it down so that everyone understands precisely what you mean.

Use Helpful Examples

Now that you’re ready to put together the content, make sure to incorporate relevant, nuanced, and interesting examples to drive home your main points. If you want to make sure your employees understand the distinction between unlawful and inappropriate behavior, use an example and have the audience give you feedback to explain the distinctions. If you want to make sure managers understand why it’s important that they let you know if they observe or hear about misconduct, don’t just tell them that “they’re required to report.” Instead, use an example that not only paints a realistic (not legalistic) picture for them, but an example that also provides usable instruction on how to handle difficult situations (including sample language they can use).

Make It Interactive

No matter the exact content or methodology, focus on interaction. This not only makes the training more engaging, it increases retention. Here are some ways to make your training interactive, engaging, and compelling:

• Use quizzes or activities.
• The questions in quizzes should be thoughtful and nuanced, not obvious or scary.
• Develop a bank of activities to use and test them out to see which resonate most with your audience.

By using an activity up front, you not only get engagement and buy in, but you can go through a portion of your agenda in a seamless and natural way (rather than having a presentation deck that doesn’t allow anyone else to talk until one hour into the training).

Use stories: Bring your stories to life by making them into an activity. Here’s one I use (based, of course, on one of my actual investigations):

Start with a basic set of facts like:

Marianne complains that Thurston asked her why she didn’t tell him his fly was open … twice. She says she finds this behavior “creepy” because he is old enough to be her father, because he talks about his preference to date young women all the time, and because she doesn’t think it’s her job to monitor his fly. Ginger investigates and finds no harassment. Her “fix” is to tell Thurston to “stop talking about his fly.”

On the next slide, I ask what happens next and give the following options:

1. Thurston says he learned a lot from the investigation. He learned he should stay away from Marianne who is clearly “hyper sensitive.”
2. Thurston retaliates against Marianne by disciplining her for spending too much time chatting with coworkers and for arriving late to work.
3. Thurston stops talking about his fly.
4. Marianne leaves the company.

In real life, all of these things happened. Using an example like this accomplishes so much.

First, it depicts a real-life and very relatable scenario. Many of us know a “Thurston” in our lives – someone who just doesn’t get it.

Next, it is an excellent way to discuss the distinction between unlawful and unprofessional (“creepy”) conduct. The initial facts don’t give rise to a legal claim, but Thurston’s actions cause Marianne reasonable distress. What can and should be done to address that?

The next part of the facts makes it clear that Ginger lost an opportunity to make the workplace better. By simply saying “no harassment” and “stop talking about your fly” she failed to let Thurston know that while his behavior wasn’t unlawful, he needed to stop oversharing, and needed to realize that the impression he was creating of himself was not positive.

In the section with the answers, I emphasize the fact that by saying he “learned to stay away from Marianne,” Thurston is revealing something incredibly important—he doesn’t understand the impact his behavior has on others. This is a problem and will dictate the type of remedial measure you decide to implement after your investigations (see Chapter 11 for more on this). One of the answers also reveals the fact that while the initial conduct wasn’t unlawful, by failing to fix the problem, Thurston has created a legitimate legal issue with his seemingly vengeful (retaliatory) behavior.

And finally, discussing the fact that Marianne left the company allows you to discuss the real-life tangible consequences of not dealing with drama effectively.

Be creative and resourceful. Find examples, research activities, learn about best methods for teaching and retaining these nuanced topics, read books and articles that inspire you—do whatever it takes to develop content that is engaging, informative, and interactive.¹

Deploying the Training

Decide who you will train and in what order you’ll deploy the training. This might be influenced by legal requirements (in those states that mandate training).

Decide how often you’ll train or in what intervals you’ll deploy training. Again, this might be partially dictated by legal mandate, but go beyond what you have to do and develop a schedule that sends the strong message that you are embarking on a long-term program.

Put together a schedule for what you’ll deploy after the initial, formal training. Will you deploy micro lessons? Will you develop discussion questions so that those lessons can be used at department meetings? Will you create a space on your company’s internal site or a social media channel to provide continuous resources to managers and employees?

Other Ways to Provide Education

Be creative and consider all sorts of educational activities to incorporate into your schedule. Maybe you develop a calendar to email, on a regular basis, a workplace scene, a guide, an activity, a call to action, or anything else that puts the issues of respect, civility, going from bystander to upstander, communication, conflict resolution, diversity, and inclusion top of mind and continues to reinforce the importance of these topics. And remember that “training” is really educating and raising awareness, so share stories, articles, books, and other resources that might not technically fall under the definition of training, but that will go a long way toward making it clear that you value these skills.

And, one final note, make sure you check in with the folks in operations to avoid scheduling conflicts. You don’t want your training schedule to interfere with projects or priorities. You want to make sure that your schedule is conducive to employees paying attention and learning.

Deploy

Create a training calendar and start scheduling sessions or rolling out e-training. Stay mindful of deadlines for mandatory training and deploy it in a way that makes it easy for everyone to be trained on time.

Track

Make sure you have a way to track who has attended/taken training. And if you’re in a state that requires a certain amount of time for training, make sure you can show compliance. Ideally, you’ll be able to develop an electronic tracking system that will allow you to monitor any reports about attendance.

Also, set up a system to remind employees if your records show they have not yet taken training.

Celebrate

Not enough companies celebrate training. As a result, it’s seen as a “must do” item rather than a “get to do” item. Set up a system to recognize a job well done. Consider giving a prize to the department who has the highest training attendance. Send out periodic updates about introspective questions you’ve received that you think everyone should read about. Involve employees and managers in the process and give them public praise for their help.