The firm that gives sexual-harassment trainings at Netflix, Yelp, and Pinterest reveals 4 key ways companies can improve office culture in 2020

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Since the start of the #MeToo movement, employers have faced more pressure to tackle workplace harassment head on.

• US companies spend $10 billion a year on compliance training to combat issues like harassment.
• But new survey data of more than 30,000 employees from Emtrain (which provides sexual harassment, bias, and code-of-conduct training for companies like Netflix, Yelp, and Pinterest) found that just 13% of employees would report workplace harassment if they saw it.
• There are a few ways companies can improve their existing training programs in 2020, including analyzing data, identifying problematic events, and using common language to discuss inappropriate behaviors.
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US companies spend $10 billion a year on compliance training to combat issues like workplace harassment - but it may not be doing much good, one workplace training provider said.

A new survey of more than 30,000 workers from Emtrain - which provides sexual harassment, bias, and code-of-conduct training for companies including Netflix, Yelp, and Pinterest - found that just 13% of employees would report workplace harassment if they saw it. Less than half of workers would even be able to recognize harassment, which ranges in severity from sexual harassment to bullying to disrespectful behavior, the survey found.

Workplace harassment has become front and center since the start of the #MeToo movement. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission received 13,055 charges of sex-based harassment in 2018 alone, up from 12,428 in 2017.

The survey, which was previewed at the From Day One conference in Los Angeles, includes data from more than 90 companies from the tech, professional services, retail, financial services, and food service industries.

Robert Todd, chief product officer at Emtrain, said most harassment is nuanced, and many training programs focus on extreme examples that most people would be able to recognize with little to no education on the subject. Even if they are trained, employees may be afraid to report harassment for fear of getting a colleague fired.

"People see something that's inappropriate, they don't want to step in and cause a larger problem," he told Business Insider. "In some cases somebody does something inappropriate and they don't want that person to get fired."

But despite these statistics, there are several steps companies should take to improve harassment training in 2020.