Sexual Harassment Training : ELT, Inc. : AB 1825, Employment Law, Online Harassment, Compliance, and Harassment Training

Every day, I am struck by the enormous appetite that exists for quality information on workplace compliance standards. While the marketplace is flooded with white papers and “best practice” summaries, most turn out to be scarce with actual content or appropriate legal references. Worse, much of the information is nothing more than sales and marketing paraphernalia. 

So what to do about the dearth of objective information on compliance standards? Enter OCEG – the Open Ethics and Compliance Group – a nonprofit that provides uniform guidelines and online resources to help employers navigate the complex integration of ethics, governance, risk management and compliance.

Today, with OCEG and Littler Mendelson, ELT hosted a webcast for more than 1,500 legal, HR and ethics professionals on the subject of employment compliance. Participants experienced a guided tour of the OCEG framework – an interactive online application that can do everything from identify state or industry specific legal requirements, to build a custom checklist of “compliance to do’s” for your company. 

The real upside? OCEG is an objective resource not looking to sell you a compliance product. It’s a nonprofit that seeks only to recover the baseline costs of providing vast informational resources to the employer community. More than 200 compliance, risk and audit specialists from a wide range of industries, academics, employment law counsel and business process experts have contributed to the development of the OCEG guidelines. Tens of thousands of hours have been invested in building standards that will define and measure compliance. At ELT and Littler, we are proud to have significantly contributed to OCEG’s employment law domain.

If you’re looking for some no nonsense answers to your most basic, or most complex compliance questions, check out OCEG.

View ELT and OCEG's webcast

Over than past 4 months, ELT has surveyed more than 2,000 legal and HR professionals about ethics and compliance training. The results paint a very clear picture – few people truly understand the training landscape. And it’s not surprising. Despite all the companies promoting and selling compliance, it’s difficult to get straight answers about compliance education standards – what you must do as an employer, and what you should do to avoid risk, and drive better performance. 

In terms of high level training requirements that impact almost all employers, regardless of size or industry, there are two giants: (1) ethics & code of conduct training, as promoted by the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, and (2) harassment prevention training, as promoted by federal & state case law, and as mandated by statute in California, Connecticut and Maine. Of course there are many other guidelines and regs that impact certain industries and certain job functions, but in terms of front line employees and managers, these are the areas with pervasive training mandates. 

Is it any wonder that harassment prevention and ethics drive the vast majority of compliance training consumption? Speaking frankly, it’s why at ELT, we focus most of our efforts and resources on these topics. They are what employers need the most and use the most. 

I think it’s also sound model to follow when it comes to spending training dollars. Buy what you need, and buy the very best quality. These are the areas where expectations are the highest, where you can make the biggest impact, where you’ll see the biggest dividends when it comes to risk management.

View the detailed ethics training survey results.

This month, a former employee of Qwest Communications filed a lawsuit alleging he was discriminated against for being gay, including being called “faggot” by co-workers and having anti-gay pamphlets put on his desk. According to the plaintiff, Donald Moreau, he faced the blatant discrimination for more than four years.

Speaking to the press, Moreau actually referenced the company’s training programs on harassment and discrimination prevention as part of the problem -- “The training had nothing to do with sexual orientation, the trainer made jokes. I basically felt re-discriminated against all over again …”

While sexual orientation has been largely ignored for many years in traditional employment law training, a contemporary harassment prevention program must address it. Sexual orientation is not a protected category under federal law, but it is protected under several state laws. (Most recently Washington State, with House Bill 2661.) More importantly, most progressive employers include sexual orientation in their prohibited harassment policies. These employers recognize the demographics of the workforce, and the necessity of protecting and respecting all workers.

Sexual orientation harassment and discrimination also skates along the edge of basic gender discrimination – for example, when an employee is teased for being too masculine or too feminine. Even in a state that does not include sexual orientation as a protected category, this kind of conduct could give rise to a gender discrimination claim.

At the end of the day, employers should live in reality. A significant portion of their workforce is gay. They need to protect those workers, and protect the organization from risk.