Workplace Safety Essentials: Harassment and Bullying Prevent

Create a culture where anyone can say no to harassment, including sexual harassment, by moving beyond policies and training, and engage in conversations about nuances to prevent it.

Explore how power dynamics drive harassment and shape daily workplace interactions. Identify and interrupt everyday power exchanges to prevent discrimination and more severe acts.

Explore harassment as a spectrum from inappropriate behaviors to violence, with microaggressions and unwanted advances, racist remarks, and derogatory comments, and learn practical prevention through empathy and discussion.

Explore harassment repercussions and why it goes unreported—retaliation fears and workplace norms—and learn to create safe spaces, empower reporting, and challenge neutralization.

Culture is the ultimate harassment prevention, creating a positive environment where peers speak up and act respectfully. Training alone cannot prevent harassment without culture, core values, empathy, and open communication.

conduct a culture assessment to understand current attitudes toward harassment, using anonymous outside interviews and a time-limited survey to drive urgent action and leadership buy-in for rapid improvements.

Embed core values alongside vision and mission into daily behaviors, training, and performance conversations to prevent harassment and shape culture.

Cultivate a top-down no-tolerance culture for incivility and harassment by training managers, enforcing policy, and addressing negative behaviors to prevent hostile environments.

Enhance harassment prevention training by integrating empathy, communication, and awareness of implicit bias, and use the Addie framework to guide learning objectives and analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation.

Establish a see something, say something culture to prevent harassment by training employees in the three steps of assertiveness: validate, describe the problem, and offer a solution.

Managers create an open communication environment that prevents harassment by promoting professionalism, inclusion, respect, and empathy, stepping in immediately and developing action items with teams.

Create a safe, trusted reporting culture with anonymous channels and peer counselors to ease retaliation fears, and audit discrimination in pay, hiring, and advancement to foster an inclusive workplace.

Facilitate open, empathetic discussions about harassment with clear goals and ground rules. Detect risks from small comments, intervene with coaching or mentoring, and foster inclusive action.

Build empathy at work by listening more than you speak, paraphrasing, asking relevant questions, and reading nonverbal cues to respect space, boundaries, and workplace policies.

Examine social media and dating policies in the workplace through real scenarios to build empathy and promote respectful online conduct, balancing free speech with harassment prevention.