Sexual Harassment Training Goes Online

Employers weigh effectiveness against cost in light of skeptical juries

June 11, 2007
By Elizabeth Agnvall

Consider the following scenario:

A woman in a purple dress hurries to her friend's desk, holding a catalog.

"Karen Marie, I've finally got it!"

"Got what?" says Karen Marie.

"The catalog," Ruth says.

Meanwhile, Herb overhears their conversation in a nearby cubicle and comes to take a look.

"See what? Oh my, my ... what are you two looking at?" Herb asks.

"I'm helping her shop for what to wear on her honeymoon," Ruth says.

"That's an easy one. I suggest nothing," Herb says and looks at Seddick, who is sitting in the next cubicle, looking embarrassed.

This isn't a real-life situation in a workplace, though it might well have been. It's a streaming video vignette from an online course on sexual harassment offered by Denver-based Anderson-davis Inc. The course uses video vignettes and audio to guide employees and supervisors through the "Intent vs. Impact" course on managing a harassment-free workplace.

Two programs—one for managers and one for supervisors—guide users through the legalities of sexual harassment policy and the value of creating a comfortable workplace. Each course includes a section on recognizing and stopping harassment and retaliation against those who rebuke it. Manager courses include sections on handling complaints and resolving disputes.

Spurred, at least in part, by laws in several states requiring employee sexual harassment training, many companies are taking the mandate further and educating all their employees about sexual harassment, regardless of where they work. (A state-by-state listing of sexual harassment training laws is included in the Society for Human Resource Management's (SHRM) Sexual Harassment Toolkit.)

Some employers are turning to the Internet to deliver, at a fraction of the cost, the same content once taught in a classroom setting. But legal experts advise HR managers to choose wisely if they go the online route. Just providing the training isn't necessarily enough to shield a company from hostile workplace claims. Content, as well as the effectiveness of the material, still matters.

The stakes for employers to ensure a harassment-free workplace are especially high in California, where damages in hostile workplace lawsuits have no caps, according to Joe Beachboard, a shareholder with Atlanta-based labor and employment law firm Ogletree Deakins in Torrance, Calif. Large California-based employers have been fined up to $25 million. Even in other states where fines are capped at $300,000, costs can still cascade when multiple plantiffs and attorney fees are added in.

One HR manager with a large California-based oil company who asked not to be identified used Anderson-davis online training in 2001 to educate more than 25,000 U.S.-based employees and is now rolling out refresher training that 3,000 supervisors must take every two years. In addition, the company is translating the training into several languages and soon will require managers around the world to take it.

The streaming video vignettes and the interactivity features make the program particularly engaging, she said.

"You don't suffer like you do with reading long text in an online course," she said.

Making Training Work

Suzy goes to her manager, upset:

"I've got a real problem. I'm not sure I know what to call it, but I think I can explain it easily enough. My colleague Jackie is, well, let's just say she's quite the party girl...

The thing is, I just don't want to hear about it every Monday morning ad nauseam. I mean she really gets around, and she feels compelled to tell me all about the past weekend's marathon activities in excruciating detail, and when I say excruciating, trust me, that's really putting it mildly! So first, it's really gross. Second, it's inappropriate. Third, I've got work to do, and fourth, I just have no interest."

This audio-photo vignette is from "Workplace Harassment II," an online sexual harassment prevention course offered by San Francisco-based Employment Law Training Inc. (ELT). (It also is offered through SHRM's e-learning program.)

The course uses an evolving story that presents students with workplace scenarios. After watching the vignette—created with photos, audio and text—users must answer interactive questions dealing with, among other things, appropriate content for discussion in the office and who should be contacted when problems arise.

The course has manager and supervisor versions; the supervisor version includes simulations of workers going to supervisors with problems and explains how to react and recognize potential harassment and retaliation issues.

Paul Mohnkern, HR manager for McLean, Va.-based MorganFranklin, a professional services firm, said he purchased ELT's program partly because of built-in mechanisms that prevent employees from breezing through the course or setting the program to play and then heading out to lunch. In other words, employees have to allow for the material to sink in to get credit for taking it.

Such safeguards are important, since courts are demanding that employers do more than simply go through the motions of providing training, according to Shanti Atkins, president and CEO of ELT.

Concerned that its sexual harassment training approach couldn't pass legal muster, the state of Illinois in 2006 forced thousands of employees to retake the course because records showed they had completed the training in as little as 10 minutes.

Effectiveness of courses can be difficult to measure, however, especially since most vendors don't track test or quiz results. That's by customer design; at least some employers fear that poor employee test scores could be used against them by a plaintiff building a hostile workplace case.

"There are published cases where training is scrutinized by a judge and a jury," says Atkins. "Ten years ago they asked, ‘Did you do the training?' Today they are asking 'How did you do it, and what did you use?' "

Atkins said that to pass muster in court, training programs should be at least 30 minutes long, contain enough content and interactivity to make the estimated times real, and use realistic scenarios and hypothetical situations.

"If employees can blast through the training quickly, they will," Atkins said. "It's human nature."

Cost Effectiveness and Efficiency

When New York City-based Barbara Kroin started as head of learning and development at French-based banking giant BNP Paribas in August 2004, she used Anderson-davis courses for online training and live training for two years. Recently she decided to abandon the classroom training altogether. It wasn't an easy decision.

"To me, live learning is valuable for something other than a course with pure knowledge. Anything that the audience has to ask questions around, you are better off in a live setting," Kroin said.

But the online course was much easier to manage and was more convenient for employees.

"The live training was a nightmare to track, and it was expensive, so we decided this go-around that we are only going to do online training," Kroin said.

Like Kroin, many HR managers must take cost effectiveness and efficiency into consideration when deciding what type of sexual harassment training to offer.

According to several anti-harassment training vendors, e-learning courses generally start at $50 per person. The price, however, can drop to as low as $15 per person when large numbers of employees take the course. Prices also are lower when companies buy more licenses or host the courses on their own learning management system.

Some employers favor online training because employees can opt to take the course at home on their own time, rather than their employers'.

Rena Cohen Kozin, vice president of sales for Jericho, N.Y.-based Interactive Employment Training Inc., which has been selling an online sexual harassment course for 10 years, said some groups are looking for the cheapest online course they can find.

But she echoes warnings of other experts that choosing an online sexual harassment course based on cost alone might be penny-wise and pound-foolish.

"There are a percentage of potential clients that contact us [who say] that price point is much more important than content or effectiveness," she said. "If there is any litigation, the training will be investigated as well."

Elizabeth Agnvall is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.