Top-Down, Industry-Level or Organizational Change

Middle managers and corporate leaders play a critical role in designing civil organizational structures and cultures, modeling civil behavior, and setting clear expectations for civil behavior. Whether you’re an employee looking for suggestions to bring to the head of your organization, a manager who can powerfully shape day-to-day worker experience and culture, or a human resource department manager looking to improve policy and training, this section provides strategies for maximizing the effectiveness of prevention and response efforts.

Even organizations with established independent reporting structures and sexual harassment training could improve their response by better understanding and mitigating the behavioral and social forces that allow sexual harassment to persist. In this section, we’ve distilled the top behavioral science research findings, along with ideas on how they could be applied to organizational anti-sexual harassment strategies.

Promising Solution 1: Create Civil and Respectful Workplace Cultures

The most powerful predictors of workplace harassment include organizations that are a) male-dominated b) hierarchical, with large power imbalances between leaders and subordinates and c) have unresponsive organizational climates where leaders and peers are willing to tolerate sexual harassment, and fail to take action to either prevent or respond to it.

One such intervention that can send a signal that harassment will not be tolerated is to employ a neutral third-party service, such as an ombuds, who is accessible, and can listen to, intervene, and advocate on behalf of employees. Examples of such a service are tEQuitable, a startup aiming to be a third-party resource and sounding board for employees seeking help or advice in the face of harassment, discrimination or bias, and All Voices, an online third party reporting tool that aggregates and anonymizes complaints for companies.

Embedding civil behavior into performance reviews and workplace expectations can also unwind the cultures that protect the superstar, high performer, or the mediocre employee with strong ties to leadership who acts abusively to others. Research has found that avoiding toxic workers can save a company more than twice as much as what a top performer can produce.

Embedding civil behavior into performance reviews can unwind the cultures that protect the superstar who acts abusively to others.

Civil cultures are crucial in service and hospitality settings, where harassment can come not only from supervisors or peers, but from clients as well. “Every worker in the service and hospitality industry must be told by management that their health and safety is more important than a sale or a customer,” Fran Sepler, who for 30 years has worked as a consultant, trainer, and investigator on workplace harassment prevention, told the New York Times. “Every worker in service and hospitality must know that they are empowered to say: ‘I’m sorry, but it’s unacceptable to treat me this way. I am happy to have my manager come and talk to you about that if you like.’”

It’s also important to make sure that organizational leaders know that they can impact climate and culture by leading by example—making sure that harassers are not going unpunished, that they are monitoring their own behavior, and that those around them have the power to hold them accountable.

Since leaders are often limited in their ability to discuss individual incidents, it’s essential that leaders send the broad message that sexual harassment runs counter to organizational values. They can do so, for example, in statements at team meetings, in the language of Employee Handbooks, and in how they announce and communicate sexual harassment training. Because leaders often have distinct communication challenges (and, like their employees, likely haven’t learned how to model inclusive behavior), experts suggest leadership-specific sexual harassment training sessions.

Beyond C-Suite leaders, middle managers also hold a tremendous amount of power to influence organizational culture, and to make sure sexual harassment policies are implemented effectively. In her testimony before the EEOC, Sepler suggests training middle managers to respond to complaints and issues in an emotionally intelligent way, creating “feedback rich” environments where people feel comfortable speaking up and listening, using metrics for monitoring and complaint handling, and understanding how these strategies can result in increased productivity, morale, teamwork, cooperation, and attendance, and help meet the organization’s bottom line goals.

Reporting technology, though untested, is emerging as a potential solution to facilitate confidential reporting, to give targets voice without fear of retaliation, and to help managers better address annoying and disrespectful behaviors before they spiral into harassment or assault. Though new and small, the nonprofit organization, Callisto, is providing a secure platform for those who’ve experienced sexual assault and harassment on select college campuses to make a complaint. The group has venture capital funding to expand to workplace settings. Though these solutions are responses to harassment, they reinforce the perception that organizations do not tolerate sexual harassment and will deal with it effectively, which can reduce future harassment.

Every worker in service and hospitality must know that they are empowered to say: ‘I’m sorry, but it’s unacceptable to treat me this way.’

Promising Solution 2: Retaliate Against Retaliation

An intervention focused on encouraging victims to come forward to report harassment is not enough. Some workers face retaliation at work months after an incident, in the form of missed promotions, blocked career paths, lack of positive references, and workplace gossip.

Once other employees catch wind of the negative repercussions a victim of sexual harassment experienced in their organization, the cycle continues with fewer workers willing to report their experience, which gives rise to a toxic culture of distrust.

Some organizations have successfully addressed the issue of retaliation through compliance hotlines, skilled Employee Assistance Programs, or ombuds, which allow workers to raise issues privately and advocate for themselves without increased attention. As discussed earlier, systems and policies that allow employees to raise awareness of an issue quietly and privately can protect workers from retaliation.

Promising Solution 3: Change the Narrative about Power—Who Has It, and How We Harness It

Power can decrease someone’s ability to understand another person’s perspective, and make individuals overestimate how much others like them. This effect can also make them more likely to think others will be romantically interested, resulting in a bias where they will perceive romantic interest where it doesn’t exist, known as the overperception bias. At the same time, research suggests that romantic suitors of all genders tend to underestimate how uncomfortable the recipients of their unwanted overtures might feel, thinking that it will be easier for them to say "no" to a request than it really is.

Power is not simply something that CEOs or C-Suite individuals have, but a dynamic that we can experience in any number of interpersonal relationships—between coworkers, customers, or clients.

Power can also be harnessed for good. Promoting the idea that being a leader requires social responsibility and accountability can lead to greater perspective taking and more prosocial, civil, and respectful environments. Miami University Psychology Professor Jonathan Kunstman suggests the following:

• Frame high-powered positions in terms of responsibility and duties to others (versus personal opportunity) in governance documents, bylaws, job ads, and other internal documents.
• Clarify that promotions and advancement is contingent on group, rather than individual success, motivating people to invest in their teams.
• Reward prosocial behaviors, like mentoring or training colleagues.
• Ask managers to publicly report how they’ve practiced prosocial leadership over the past month—or to pledge that they will commit to certain behaviors. Because no one wants to be a hypocrite, over time, people come to convince themselves that they were in favor of the pledge all along.

Power can also be harnessed for good.

Promising Solution 4: Promote More Women to Leadership and Management Positions

Simply having a woman or two at the top won’t necessarily change a culture. Any shift towards greater parity must be accompanied by holistic structural and policy changes. Still, cultural change can happen when organizations significantly increase the number of women in leadership and “core” jobs (jobs with high levels of seniority, authority, and influence) in part because women are less likely to harass, and less likely to be as hierarchical in how they wield power.

In her book Broad Influence, journalist Jay Newton-Small examined the theory of critical mass and found that when groups reach between 20-30 percent women, they are freed from their “token” role which can constrain their ability to be authentic and share divergent perspectives. This more equal gender ratio can also reduce the pressure that men may feel to act in accordance to their gender expectations.

Promising Solution 5: Write Policies that Make Sense to the People They Affect

People tend to not read or understand legalese, but that’s the language that most harassment policies are written in. Don’t assume that everyone is interpreting the language in the same way; ensure that the policy is written in plain, clear language. Equally important, leadership must set an example for how to interpret a particular policy—without that role modeling, even the most comprehensive and clear policy will be ineffective.

Promising Solution 6: Skip Canned and Digital for Interactive, In-person Training

While many organizations run online training, research on college campuses has found that in-person training is more effective to truly change cultural norms and shift behavior, sparking discussions that can normalize prosocial behavior and make it clear that peers won’t tolerate violators. Without this kind of conversation, speaking up against harassment can carry a powerful social stigma and consequences like ostracism or retaliation. Also critical is teaching actual skills to intervene before, during, and after an incident, such as bystander intervention strategies.

Because statistically, men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of sexual harassment, male employees participating in legal compliance workplace trainings that focus on “perpetrators” and “victims,” may fear being categorized themselves as one of the “bad guys.” Feeling threatened in this way may trigger a backlash response.

“For men, it’s high stakes: they don’t want to be perceived as having harassed, and they’re worried about the cost of saying ‘the wrong thing’ on their relationships with colleagues who they’ll see in tomorrow’s team meeting,” says Rory Gerberg, an anti-sexual harassment trainer and consultant with the firm Readyset. “It’s personal. It’s hard to recognize that you may have been part of the problem. It’s critical that [anti-harassment training] facilitators are able to avoid the fear and shame that so often characterizes these conversations. It’s physiologically impossible for us to learn under that state of threat.”

Narrowly focused sexual harassment training can also backfire. Sociologist Justine Tinkler has found that legal sexual harassment training can also reinforce gender stereotypes and promote backlash against women. Other research suggests that men may be less able to identify sexually coercive behavior after a training, and may be more likely to blame the victim. Tinkler suggests that trainings “should be assessed for their effects on attitudes about gender stereotypes and other issues before they’re implemented.” The EEOC's new harassment prevention and respectful workplace training, authored by Fran Sepler, includes legal compliance, bystander intervention, and workplace civility.

In-person training is more effective to truly change cultural norms and shift behavior.

Promising Solution 7: Devote Resources to Changing Systems and Cultural Norms

Attitude change isn’t a necessary precursor to behavior change. In her work in Rwanda, MacArthur Genius grantee Betsy Levy Paluck has found that behavior change can come not from changing attitudes, but from changing perceptions of social norms around particular behaviors. Sexual harassers, in other words, may not suddenly become social justice warriors, but they may curtail behavior based on the perception that it’s not tolerated in their workplace, and no one else is doing it. Organizational leaders can play a powerful norm-shifting role by making it clear that certain behavior won’t be tolerated, as can the creation of new, accessible workplace policies.

In other research, Levy Paluck found that the Supreme Court’s gay marriage ruling was enough to shift social norms around same-sex marriage. Also crucial is to counter the perception that everyone is doing a certain behavior—like harassing and assaulting women in the workplace. Promundo, a non-governmental organization, as well as other researchers have found a significant gap between men’s perceptions of how many of their peers are engaging in harmful harassing behavior and the reality, which is much smaller. Because this misperception may prevent men from intervening to stop behavior or even make them more likely to engage in the behavior themselves, communicating that these men are in the minority and this behavior is unacceptable can be an important message for shifting overall perceptions.

Tweaking systems and processes can be a powerful behavioral lever. Harvard Behavioral Economist Iris Bohnet has found that changing systems and processes—like structured interviews in hiring and mission-related metrics to determine promotion practices and performance evaluations—has led to a more sustainable form of behavior change when it comes to cultivating more inclusive, equal workplaces. For instance, using structured interview questions and evaluating them blind, without identifying details, can lead to choosing the best candidate, regardless of race or gender, whereas the typical interview process is often subjective and, because humans tend to prefer others like them, can lead to biased decisions.

Take climate surveys and use them. Organizations may be reluctant to use climate surveys for fear that finding out about a problem may create legal liability. But without effective surveys, organizations aren’t able to identify, understand, and address problems, or see whether interventions are having the intended effect. At a very minimum, organizations can include questions in their usual engagement surveys. A "How To” guide to designing such workplace questions put together by Futures without Violence suggests asking questions about specific behaviors with examples, such as, “In the past 12 months, how often did someone repeatedly tell sexual stories or jokes that were offensive to you?”

Create tiered responses to the spectrum of harassing behavior, rather than a one-size-fits-all zero-tolerance policy. Some psychologists say zero tolerance policies can actually lead to less reporting because victims are deterred by the significant and sometimes disproportionate consequences of reporting harassing behavior: Targets may simply want the behavior to stop, not get the perpetrator fired. Zero tolerance policies can increase the likelihood of retaliation, and leave very little room to address the “gray area” of harassment. Creating tiered responses can help workers feel their needs are addressed, and company policy is proportional to the experience of harassment.