Early in her career, Sheryl Miller, a UK-based DE&I consultant and author of Smashing Stereotypes, worked for a bully—a man she told HR Brew was known around the office for being “quite aggressive” and patronizing towards female staff. She recalled one day when he “went off” on her in a team meeting and invited her colleagues to “pile in.” A couple, she said, did, though others stayed silent.
“Within about a day, at least…two people contacted me to apologize and say, ‘Those behaviors were not right,’” Miller remembered. “But nothing happened in the meeting.”
Miller said the experience chipped away at her confidence over time.
Her experience isn’t unique. Some 30% of Americans, an estimated 48.6 million workers, have experienced abusive behavior at work, according to the Workplace Bullying Institute’s 2021 US Workplace Bullying Survey. An additional 19% reported having witnessed it.
Some companies invest in bystander training to help employees recognize harassment and intervene, explained Sharyn Potter, professor of women and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire. Such programs—98% of organizations in the US have a policy forbidding harassment—aim to extend the eyes and ears of HR departments to every conference room, Zoom call, and Slack channel.
But that’s only if the training works, and evidence suggests it might not. A recent study from New Zealand found that though bystander training increased employees’ understanding of harassment, it did not prepare them to put the intervention tactics they learned into practice. Just 4% of employees who participated in the Workplace Bullying Institute’s survey said that positive actions by a coworker stopped a pattern of abuse. So, how can HR help workers find their voice?
From the top. One of the biggest barriers to employees intervening in cases of harassment and incivility, Joana Kuntz, co-author of the New Zealand study, told us, comes from not feeling the psychological safety necessary to do so. Most employees conduct an internal cost–benefit analysis when considering intervening, she said. If they receive bystander training in an abusive organizational culture, asking them to speak up and possibly take on professional and social costs is tantamount to asking them to move a brick wall. It is, as Kuntz put it, a “waste of resources.”
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“The effectiveness of training including bystander intervention training is contingent on leadership development and organizational culture development,” Kuntz argued.
Leaders, she said, set the tone of the organization. They determine whether workers have heavy workloads, operate under stressful conditions, or are encouraged to step on each others’ toes—all of which can lead to incivility. If HR wants bystander training to be successful, they need to get leaders to role model and champion civility.
But it’s not enough to just reduce the costs of speaking up, Kuntz said. Employees have to feel there’s a benefit, too.
“Being recognized by a manager goes a long way,” Kuntz said, adding, “In the absence of recognition, there’s really not much of an incentive [to speak up]. People don’t like confrontation.”
Roleplay. When it comes time to train teams, Potter said that so many programs she’s reviewed focus too heavily on defining what harassment is and fall short of answering: What on earth should you do if you experience it?
“[Trainings] bring people awareness and knowledge…but they don’t give people the skills to be able to intervene and address the problem,” she explained. When HR is selecting a training, she advises looking for programs that help employees respond.
She said the training at Soteria Solutions, the consultancy associated with her research team at the University of New Hampshire, accomplishes this. Called Bringing in the Bystander, it is an interactive program in which trainers and employees go through possible scenarios and discuss how to engage safely, either directly or indirectly. Even “subtly changing the dynamic” by interrupting an event to propose a coffee run can count as bystanding, Potter said.
Ultimately, the purpose of roleplay training is to create an environment where employees feel like they have allies in the room—hopefully, allies who will push them to advocate for themselves, as outlined in the company’s harassment policy.
“That’s the real importance of bystander intervention training,” Potter said. “Hopefully, I can talk to my colleague about…what happened and they can say, ‘You know, that person was totally inappropriate. We should go to HR.’”—SV