Sexual Harassment Prevention

Our approach to sexual harassment prevention leans heavily on one of Mix’s core values – “candid but kind”. That means we assume good intent: no one wants their colleagues to feel unsafe at work. But we also speak hard truths when needed.

That might involve using anonymised anecdotes from your own workforce, such as comments from an engagement survey, or using statistics to show how many people are impacted by sexual harassment. But our approach goes beyond helping people identify what sexual harassment is and what they need to do at work. We help learners understand the impact their actions can have on colleagues.

For example, something that is seen as a joke can still affect someone’s confidence, how they show up at work, and even how they progress or get promoted. So our emphasis is not just on knowledge transfer, although that is important. We want to support real behaviour change, so the preventative approach to sexual harassment is actually taken seriously.

We have delivered sexual harassment training to thousands of people across the world now, and we know what works. For example, with managers, we know it can be hard to respond in the moment if someone discloses sexual harassment to you.

Rather than just telling managers what to do, we build in skills practice. First, we show them what a good conversation looks like. Then we give them the scaffolding and tools to practise it themselves in the session.
We approach this with the view that it is better to make mistakes in a learning room and learn from them, rather than saying the words for the first time in a real situation and stumbling over them.

All of our training is built with compliance in mind, but we focus on the real human element and the impact sexual harassment has in the workplace. Our experience training global teams also helps us approach the topic in a nuanced way. Some colleagues may be less familiar with the terminology or less comfortable discussing these issues, so we find the balance between being culturally appropriate and meeting compliance requirements.

Finally, wherever possible, we work collaboratively with an organisation’s leaders and HR team. We do not want this to feel like a separate initiative that sits apart from the rest of the organisation. It needs to be embedded, so we use the organisation’s values, language and existing priorities wherever we can.

Mix training can help organisations build compliance with legislation around the prevention of sexual harassment, although it is worth noting that training alone does not ensure compliance.

In the short term, reports or disclosures of sexual harassment might actually increase. That can make the statistics look worse, but this is, in fact, a sign that people are more familiar with the reporting routes and have more faith in the system.

Over the longer term, our aim is that the culture starts to truly shift. In the UK, one way we sometimes talk about this is by using the smoking ban as an analogy. For years, the UK government tried to discourage people from smoking through different initiatives, but it was the legislation banning smoking in public places that really helped shift the culture. Now, lots of people would be shocked to see someone smoking in a public place.

That is the kind of shift we hope this training can support. We want sexual harassment in the workplace to become something that feels completely unacceptable and, over time, something people look back on as a thing of the past. Our goal is also that this helps reduce inequities at work, because people will feel safer, more respected and more able to thrive.

Yes. We have off-the-shelf options, but lots of clients choose to go down the bespoke route so we can talk about your policy specifically and make the training feel more relevant to your people.

This training is designed to help build compliance with the Worker Protection Act, although training alone is not enough to ensure compliance. Policy reviews, risk assessments and meaningful interventions are all part of what helps an organisation build compliance.

Mix only uses experienced and trusted facilitators to deliver this training. It can be a tricky topic, so we need to make sure we have the right people in the room steering the conversation.

There is no fixed rule, as it depends on lots of factors. As a rule of thumb, we find that most organisations are doing some kind of refresher on the prevention of sexual harassment every two years or so.

We usually recommend separating team members and managers. Managers have more responsibility and more influence when it comes to preventing sexual harassment, and we also want to give them a safe space to ask questions without worrying about what their team members might think.

Mix’s training is effective because we always meet organisations where they are in their sexual harassment prevention journey. For organisations that have not done much in this area yet, our off-the-shelf e-learning covers the basics that team members and managers need to know.

For organisations further down the line, we can provide completely bespoke packages.

The benefit of bespoke training is that it becomes far more meaningful for your organisation. For example, instead of saying “refer to your policy”, we can use the specific wording from your policy and say exactly where it is saved on your shared drive. We can also use relevant anecdotes and scenarios. Someone stacking shelves in a supermarket is likely to experience or witness sexual harassment in a very different way from a junior solicitor in a large law firm, so the examples need to feel relevant to the people taking the training.

We can use language that is specific to your organisation, and we can tie the content in with your other training, too. That means it doesn’t just feel like another thing on the to-do list, but becomes a more holistic and integral part of what you are already doing. For example, in one law firm we delivered the sexual harassment training alongside wider speak-up training and bystander intervention training (Read the case study).

Finally, we’re not just training providers, we are also a consultancy firm. So if an organisation needs support developing its policy, stress testing its risk assessments, or helping its HR or ER team run fair investigations into sexual harassment, Mix can provide the whole package.

Yes, we can deliver this virtually. That said, especially with leaders, we often find it is most effective when we can be in the room together. We also have off the shelf e-learning and can create bespoke e-learning. This is particularly useful for onboarding.