About that Online Course in Workplace Sexual Harassment Prevention

Did you know that “effective ethics and compliance training is more than just a formality in the onboarding process”? Onboarding process? I hear a phrase like that and I fear for the mental health of the writer. Has the poor sod been hit in the head with an axe, I wonder. Not to be cranio-centric or anything.

I’m not technically in the onboarding process myself, since I’ve been at sea with the wreckage of my institution for twenty-eight years. But, here’s the thing about this more-than-just-a-formality ethics training; done right it can be “integrated directly into every employee’s daily workflow.” And that’s why, annually, my fellow employees and I get notified that it’s that time of year again, when yellow leaves or few or none do hold and we need to turn our workflow in the direction of the three required web-based training programs about workplace harassment and Title IX.

Is is just me or is there something fundamentally fraudulent about frog-marching employees through the compliance certification virtual obstacle course? Isn’t harassment, first and foremost, an embodied experience? Isn’t the thoroughly vacuous exercise of ticking the right boxes each year simply a ritual for reducing the business’s exposure to risk? It allows the brass to declare that all the employees at Pencilneck U are certified compliant in workplace harassment prevention, so if there’s harassment here, it’s not on the U or the administration.

But, the funny thing about teaching here at Pencilneck is that the administration has repeatedly hired athletic coaches, male and female, who’ve ended up at the center of workplace harassment scandals. (SNL did a skit about one of our basketball coaches — that’s a measure of how big the scandals have been.) And just this year, the administration was crowing about having landed a grant-getting whale from the Ivy Leagues, only to have the news break, as this professor was moving into her new digs, that she had been investigated and put on notice for the hostile work environment she had created in the center she was leaving behind. (So much for being certified in Due Diligence, yo!) Objectively, there is plenty of evidence to support the argument that the administration has recruited and retained Hostile Workplace Climate Creators, despite the fact that those doing the recruiting have been onboarded and workflowed through the compliance certification process.

So, these are a few of the reasons why, every year, I put off being certified. When asked why I am so late to the process, I say, “I take workplace harassment too seriously to participate in the annual ritual of rehanging the administration’s digital fig leaf.” Eventually I get elevated to the highest level of threatening email reminders and I fall into line, sort of.

If you’ve never taken one of these online certification courses, you may not know they are impossible to fail. This year’s version did have a new wrinkle. It tried to stop users from skipping all the text and going straight to the multiple choice quizzes by substituting videos that the users had to watch before getting access to the quizzes. If this stratagem of forced watching actually worked, the certification seekers would’ve been in for more than two hours of powerpoint slides mixing information and illustrative scenarios. But, the mandatory reeducation is easily circumvented: you just slide the video’s play head to the end of each video and then you’re cleared to the certification exam area. All that fast-forwarding took me about five minutes or so.

Once in the exam area, all users are treated to scenarios where they have to determine what the right course of action is. Funny thing, though: the overwhelming number of the examples involve women doing the harassing. A young female manager who calls an older employee “grandpa” and refuses to allow him to work on tech related tasks. Another female exec who is always saying sexually explicit things in front of her female secretary. A female client who makes passes at a female employee.

Oddly, no scenarios where male faculty meet with female students behind closed doors. No examples of male faculty taking female grad students out for lunch and talking about how attractive they are. No examples of male program directors terrorizing their staff with irrational outbursts or sending one of his assistants off to fire a part-time lecturer in front of his class. No examples of male administrators pressuring subordinates to stay late, to come in on weekends, to pick up dry cleaning, to provide a back rub. No ordinary, everyday, decades of looking the other way scenarios.

And if, by some considerable effort, the certification-seeker manages to tick the wrong answer box for one of the provided scenarios, immediate review is available with the correct answers provided, followed by the opportunity to retake the failed section, with some questions repeated verbatim. It is, in short, impossible to fail, impossible not to get certified.

One question did get me to laugh out loud. The scenario involved a woman who kept sending a co-worker unwanted love notes, even after he made clear the advances were unwelcome. What to do? Report the issue to the manager? Send the aggressor information about workplace harassment? Tell her to stop a third time? Or place the love letters on her desk and set them on fire? The poor question writers. Even they seem to have been driven to the edge of madness by the mind-numbing work of producing tests with a guaranteed 100% pass rate.

No one who takes workplace violence seriously can take online certification seriously. And no educator who values genuine understanding could ever defend this annual exercise in mindless compliance. This is just busy work for the little people, something to distract us while the party in power acquits the president, applauds when he awards the Medal of Honor to a racist who promotes violence against women, and looks forward with glee to the vengeance that now can be released by unchecked executive power.