10,000 L.A. City Workers Get Trained in 90 Days

The city of Los Angeles was facing a deadline this fall that might have given the most experienced trainer anxiety. By Jan. 1, it needed to provide sexual harassment training to some 10,000 workers in order to remain in compliance with California’s Assembly Bill 1825.
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::/br::The bill, signed into law in 2004, mandated that any employer with 50 or more employees “provide at least two hours of classroom or other effective training and education regarding sexual harassment to all supervisory employees who are employed as of July 1, 2005, and to all new supervisory employees within six months of their assumption of a supervisory position.” What that meant was a quick, quality fix, says Kerry Chaffin, senior training consultant with Shawnee Mission, Kan.-based Rockhurst University Continuing Education Center/National Seminars and Padgett-Thompson.
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To meet the challenge, the city enlisted Chaffin’s help to create a custom e-learning solution. The design work for the program, which Rockhurst developed along with an undisclosed compliance-training partner, was done in September so the workers could complete the program in October, November and December, Chaffin says. Creating a custom solution for the city that took into consideration the specifics of what it was trying to achieve—sexual harassment training that was in some ways even more rigorous than that imposed by the state—was key, she says.
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::/br::Chaffin says, for instance, that the use of language in the program had to be carefully pored over. City laws are exact when it comes to use of the term “domestic partner,” for instance, so the wording used in the program had to reflect that. “As we related to conduct, we had to be sure the policies and courseware supported the fact that the city has a domestic partner ordinance,” she says. “Domestic partners are on equal footing as a spouse, so we had to make sure everything along that course, any representations in that area, were within the city guidelines.” The scenarios used to illustrate sexual harassment, therefore, could never make reference to spouses without also referring to domestic partners.
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::/br::In addition to the obvious no-no’s like the illegality of asking employees their sexual preference or withholding promotion without sexual favors, the coursework also covers much more subtle points such as inappropriate workplace humor, and even potentially offensive actions such as hanging certain posters and giving backrubs, which are illegal among L.A. city employees.
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::/br::To accomplish this, the two-hour course was presented as a series of video still-shots featuring text boxes and accompanying audio that described scenarios to paint a picture of the legal definition of sexual harassment. After each description, participants were asked whether the actions portrayed were correct or incorrect according to the law. If they answered incorrectly, it explained why the behavior depicted was improper, Chaffin says. A certification test is administered at the end.
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::/br::Like businesses that employ LMSs, the city found a strong advantage in the technology’s ability to keep records of course completion. “The city keeps the records online at the LMS system,” Chaffin explains. “The city can look at those at any point in time to find out who has completed the program as well as who’s started and not completed it.”