Let’s cut to the chase:  mitigating damages for sexual harassment in the workplace liability is much more difficult when an employer hasn’t trained their workforce in prevention.  It’s awkward to try to make a compelling argument that management has taken reasonable steps to detect and prevent misconduct when employees haven’t received guidance on what unacceptable behavior is and how to report and prevent it.

In the unhappy eventuality that a claim of sexual harassment or sexual assault ends up in front of a state or federal agency or in civil or criminal court, the workplace record of a comprehensive program of ongoing sexual harassment prevention training can be an important defense.  Save those completion certificates and make a note of our certificate validator, because should they become needed, you’ll be very glad you took the time to train. 

This is a headache of an entirely different level.  Besides the direct costs of legal fees, time and attention, knock-on effects of reputation management and damaged labor relations are also foreseeable.  No company wants to find itself on this route.

Fortunately, the cost/benefit analysis is clear.  Providing sexual harassment prevention training online through California Required Training Solutions is inexpensive, quick, and easy.  With compliance made simple, avoiding unnecessary penalty costs is as little as fifteen minutes away. 

SB1343 doesn’t allow for monetary penalties.  Instead, the DFEH has stated, via a published FAQ document, that they “will work with employers to obtain compliance with the law” if they find the law has been violated. 

While this language sounds vague and cooperative, those in the know can detect an ominous echo.  Indeed, working with a state agency can be challenging for even the most savvy government contractors.  For most businesses, cooperating with an entity entirely apart from the realities of competitive markets could be painful indeed.  This is ‘cooperation’ to be avoided at all costs.

This is a highly inexpensive (for the State) method of monitoring compliance.  By doing it this way, the DFEH immediately got 20+ million additional compliance inspectors, free of charge.  After all, your employees know whether or not they received the training. 

For businesses, on the other hand, this dynamic is highly problematic.  The California DFEH is the main state agency charged with investigating violations and enforcing laws related to discrimination in employment.  Paving the route between rank-and-file employees and this state regulator is a headache few companies would welcome.

Your employees are listening closely to the cues you send them, both stated and unstated (as observed in behavior).   If you give even the impression that employees’ comfort level in the workplace is unimportant to management, you risk your staff concluding that you don’t want to know.  And that conclusion can be very costly to your business now, and long into the future. 

Because when employees conclude that management doesn’t really want to know about workplace conduct, it’s only a matter of time until reports of misconduct are not made or suppressed. Problems that otherwise could be remediated can snowball quickly.  And a relationship with the workforce that took years to build can be damaged very quickly.

At the same time as much of our workforce was not being trained, No Tolerance sexual misconduct policies rose to prominence.  Meaning that an employee could be fired without prior warning for behavior s/he was never trained on and may not even have realized was wrong.  Recent legal developments just make the potential gap even wider.  For example, do your employees know that transgender employees are protected from discrimination in the workplace, regardless of which state they work in?  A June 2020 Supreme Court decision on a Title VII case made that clarification.  But unless your staff are training promptly every two years, many would not yet know this.

Your employees can’t avoid behavior they don’t know is wrong.