Psychological Safety - A Legal Obligation?

Is Psychological Safety a legal obligation? In short, no. But it’s now as near as it gets to being one.

In October 2024, new duties under the Equality Act 2010 came into force which placed duties on employers to act proactively, rather than reactively, taking reasonable steps to prevent sexual harrassment at work. They need to anticipate when sexual assault may happen, and if it already has, make sure it never happens again.

What is reasonable? The first thing to understand, depsite the current politicising of the issue, is that weak Diversity, Equity and Inclusion enables sexual harrassment (actually, all types of characteristic-based harrassment), and that having strong DEI within your company is a great way to reduce it.

However, ACAS also recommends that employers should create a culture where sexual harrassment is understood by everyone, at all levels, to be unacceptable. They recommend that this includes:

“developing a policy on sexual harassment, training managers on their responsibilities, and creating an environment where people feel safe to report incidents of sexual harassment and situations where they felt unsafe.” (ACAS, 2024)

The thing is, I’m not sure this quite goes far enough. If the goal is to make everyone, at all levels, understand how harmful and ubiquitous sexual harrassment is (52% of women report having experienced it at work), simply training managers doesn’t do it. It seems to me that training not only on why sexual harrassment is unnacceptable, but what actually constitutes sexual harrassment, is now a must for every employee. Managers do need to know their responsibilities, but it’s peers who have the real power here. You’re less likely to repeat behaviour that’s been called out by your peers, regardless of what your manager says.

In that respect, the current eLearning offered by the vast majority of L&D specialists simply doesn’t cut it either. It seems obvious that if you can make jokes about not really reading it, just clicking through until you get a tick, then it isn’t remotely effective. New(er) techniques such as bite-size learning and gamified courses can improve this, but eLearning alone will never change organisational culture.

This is where psychological safety (a culture in which people feel safe to talk about their concerns, mistakes, ideas and questions) comes into it’s own. Considering that the guidance provided by ACAS outright states that people should feel safe to raise their concerns, it seems a no-brainer.

However, we’re talking about culture change - so psychological safety runs all the way through this ACAS guidance. One of the main causes of sexual harrassment lies in toxic masculinity and the rejection of ‘policing ‘banter’ and ‘political correctness.’ We know that changing beliefs is hard; and almost never happens over the course of a single training module or conversation. Not only that, but when was the last time you changed your most basic behaviours just because someone told you to? Because they told you that the beliefs that drive those behaviours are wrong? Frankly, it’s a fantasy to expect eLearning to resolve this problem.

The only way to affect real, lasting change is through consistency of effort; and by ensuring your employees are (not feel) genuinely listened to. Dragging them into a room to lecture them on these points will likely only entrench beliefs and behaviours. These conversations need to be two-way - in a nutshell, employees need to feel safe to discuss these issues without fear of being slapped down. To put it another way, they need to be psychologically safe.

Sources:

Gov.uk - https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-protections-from-sexual-harassment-come-into-force

ACAS - https://www.acas.org.uk/acas-urges-employers-to-act-now-on-sexual-harassment

Dobbin, F & Kalev, A (2017) on reducing sexual harrasment via effective DEI strategies - https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alexandra-Kalev/publication/361164373_Training_programs_and_reporting_systems_won't_end_sexual_harassment_Promoting_more_women_will/links/62dfb1d37782323cf1796dc3/Training-programs-and-reporting-systems-wont-end-sexual-harassment-Promoting-more-women-will.pdf