Safer Spaces: Ideating Education around Workplace Sexual Harassment

2 min read

[Content Warning: Sexual Harassment]

Our previous blog posts discussed the motivation for go2HR to introduce education and training for the tourism and hospitality industry around workplace sexual harassment. With support from Justice Canada, the organization is navigating an ambitious three-year initiative that aims to help create sexual harassment free workplaces in B.C.’s tourism and hospitality industry. By establishing “safer spaces”, workers feel empowered to report harassment and employers are held accountable for cultivating safe workplaces.

Naturally, designing a robust training program around an issue as complex and nuanced as workplace sexual harassment is a challenging task. However, the team of experts convened by go2HR – including professionals from go2HR’s health and safety, communications and industry training departments; Spark + Co., developers of custom e-learning; and Bunderfost Creative, a graphic design company – shares a commitment and drive to elevate education around workers’ rights and the critical need to maintain respectful and safe work environments in tourism and hospitality.

“We started this entire program from scratch and it marked go2HR’s entry into a whole new area of workplace health and safety,” said Stephanie Mallalieu, of go2HR and the project manager for Safer Spaces. It was very important to build a project team that shared a deep commitment to this topic, with the right balance of skills to be able to do the work. The expertise that everyone brought quickly became apparent and even though we were in the very early stages, there was a lot of faith that everyone would do the right thing by this project”.

Ultimately, the project team opted to start soliciting input from the most important source – the tourism and hospitality industry. A Safer Spaces Advisory Committee was quickly established, with representation from across the industry associations, as well as a hands-on Working Group, that would be called upon to help shape the online training course and provide industry content. The project team solicited input from the many stakeholders involved in the early stages, ensuring the objectives of Safer Spaces aligned with industry needs. The project team was clear that the training course needed to bring in the industry right from the beginning, making them part of the process and ultimately helping to shape something that would work for them.