Supervisor Onboarding: Workplace Harassment Training

Acculturation onboarding covers many aspects of training and orientation. Much of this instruction is designed to provide information and skills necessary for employees to be fully productive. However, there is a subset of acculturation that can actually be mandated by government entities.

In both California and Connecticut, private employers with 50 or more employees are required by law to provide workplace/sexual harassment training for all new supervisors. In Maine, employers with as few as 15 employees must send supervisors through specialized harassment training within 1 year of their hire date. Employers must also keep records of how and when these requirements were fulfilled.

If you hire an employee to serve in any supervisory capacity, he/she should participate in this training as soon as possible. This is the best way to protect your organization from litigation. In California, especially, employers can be held liable for any act of harassment on the part of a supervisor or manager.

Best Practices for Providing Workplace Harassment Training During Onboarding

The type and extent of information that must be covered in these classes varies by state. The level of interactivity may also be specified. For example, Connecticut allows supervisors to go through training online if they have the ability to ask questions in that environment. This means employers in CT could readily automate the process of signing supervisors up for training with a third party agency as part of the onboarding process.

For all employers, ensuring that no newly hired supervisors slip through the cracks is important. Your acculturation platform should definitely:

• Schedule workplace harassment training within the time-frame required by law
• Automatically follow up and verify classes were attended
• Ensure all reports documenting attendance are stored in an accessible format
• Survey the level of knowledge supervisors retain on the topics discussed in training
• Provide further resources for further self-training & remediation as needed