Research From Emtrain and Center for Worklife Law Finds Links Between Bias, Respect, and Harassment in the Workplace

• Organizations Must Eliminate Silos Between Dei, Culture and Anti-harassment Initiatives

Emtrain, which provides eLearning and analytics that measure the impact of social dynamics in the workplace, released a research report which links respect, bias, and incidences of sexual harassment in the workplace. The report also provides insight into how addressing these issues holistically can help companies win the war for talent during the Great Resignation. This research report was done in partnership with the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California-Hastings, a pioneer in workplace equity.

The research report, titled “A Data-Driven Approach to Winning the War for Talent During the Great Resignation,” looked at recent workplace data from 22,000 employees across different industries. Emtrain and the Center for WorkLife Law have become the first to link reports of respect, inclusion, bias, and sexual harassment in the workplace. The research found that employees whose workplace experience showed bias and a lack of respect and inclusion were more likely to report incidents of harassment.

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“The takeaway message here is clear,” said Joan C. Williams, Director of the Center for WorkLife Law. “Respect, authenticity and belonging, and confidence in career development opportunities are all impacted by workplace bias. Furthermore, sexual harassment is strongly linked to bias, belonging, and confidence in career development opportunities.”

The report suggests these findings can be a challenge for organizations that tend to manage harassment, inclusion, and respect in different functional silos: human resources teams select anti-harassment training and learning & development teams deploy it, legal teams manage discrimination and harassment complaints and claims to protect the organization from financial and reputation risk, and diversity leaders are tasked with inclusion, many of them in newly created positions across leading companies and in silos.

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“This should serve as a wake up call for companies that take a siloed approach to their DEI, culture, and anti-harassment initiatives,” said Emtrain CEO Janine Yancey. “This siloed approach is flawed: because these issues are linked, organizations committed to creating lasting change need to address respect, inclusion, respect, bias, and harassment in a holistic manner. Companies that ignore the connection between these initiatives expose themselves to greater risk and are at danger of losing valuable talent.”

The report details a few solutions for addressing this challenge to retain top talent, including:

• Coordinate across silos. Anti-harassment and inclusion initiatives are best measured, designed, and delivered in conjunction with each other, because the issues are intrinsically linked.
• Measure perceptions and behaviors as they pertain to business operations. Don’t analyze harassment claims data separate from diversity and inclusion or culture-related data.
• Train holistically. Anti-harassment training, inclusion and diversity training, and employee engagement programs are different dimensions of the same set of challenges and they share common roots. Focus training on skill building for the attitudes and behaviors that help teams identify and mitigate bias and foster inclusion.

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