14
HR
West
®
NEW TRAINING PARADIGM
California changed its harassment training law
because, as it turns out, telling people something
is illegal doesn’t actually have an impact on their
behavior. While the labor laws are important to
know, they only exist to provide legal remedies
IF the abusive behavior is not stopped. What we
should be teaching is how to get the unwanted
behavior to stop so that employees don’t have to
resort to the labor laws at all.
Abusive behavior is a behavioral problem that
requires a behavioral solution. This is why AB
2053 requires that companies now provide
behavioral training in addition to the previously
mandated legal training.
While this change was very much needed and,
from my standpoint as a provider of behavioral
based trainings, very welcome, it does present
challenges to employers. Harassment trainings
are no longer all the same. Employers must learn
how to evaluate behavioral based trainings to
ensure that what they provide is not just compliant
with the law, but that it will actually have the
desired behavioral impact as well.
BULLYING/HARASSMENT/
RETALIATION/DISCRIMINATION
The new training requirement is about preventing
abusive behavior period. And this makes sense
because all of those problems that we have
different names for are actually all the same from a
behavioral perspective.
What we call it doesn’t really matter. Abusive
conduct or bullying is a behavioral strategy used
to gain inappropriate access to resources and
status within a social group using fear, intimidation
and/or threats to get your way.
What harassment, bullying, discrimination and/or
retaliation all have in common is that they are all
ways to socially isolate a victim. Social isolation is
an immensely powerful tool of social control. The
method used to create social isolation doesn’t
really matter. The real problem is the social
isolation. The various forms of harassment that
have been declared illegal are illegal precisely
because of the immense psychological and fiscal
damage social isolation causes both to the victim
and to the organization they work for.
If you want to protect people from harassment,
you have to grapple with the underlying problem
of social isolation in the workplace and not just
worry about the most egregious ways that social
isolation manifests.
TAKING A BEHAVIORAL APPROACH
When you take a behavioral approach to the
problem of harassment, you understand that it
doesn’t matter who the victim is. Anyone can be
isolated. It also doesn’t matter whether a bully
WHY AB 2053 WILL CHANGE HOW WE DEAL WITH BULLIES IN THE WORKPLACE AND BEYOND
I T ’ S NOT JUST ABOUT
T
he passage of AB 2053 in January
2015 presents California employers
with a new compliance requirement
and a new opportunity. Employers
can use this new law to teach their employees the
behavioral skills necessary to stop abuse in the
workplace. If they do, they can have a profound
impact not only on their workplace but also in the
communities in which they live and work.
THE LAW: AB 1825/2053
It’s an open secret that most sexual harassment
training is boring and ineffective. It doesn’t matter
who teaches it, the required content is not very
interesting and not very helpful. California law AB
1825 requires that 11 separate topics be taught
in a 2 hour period. 10 ½ of those topics involve
telling supervisors that harassment is illegal in
the workplace under certain circumstance, those
circumstances being if the victim is a member
of a protected class either under California or
Federal law.
That all changed with the enactment of AB
2053 which requires that all AB 1825 training
now include “specific training and education on
how to prevent abusive conduct,” defined as
malicious “conduct that a reasonable person
would find hostile, offensive, and unrelated to an
employer’s legitimate business interests.”
Harassment training must now teach people how
to prevent and stop abusive behavior whether the
victim is in a protected class or not. A standard
harassment training that covers the law and little
else is no longer considered legally compliant in
the state.
By Jennifer Hancock
AB 2053
A standard harassment
training that covers the
law and little else is no
longer considered legally
compliant in the state.
HARASSMENT
ANYMORE
