Course Curriculum
First response matters.
Do it well.
- What to do when a colleague discloses harassment
- How to respond without minimising or taking over
- Making someone feel safe in the moment of disclosure
- What your role is and is not in this situation
- Behaviours that genuinely help a colleague here
- Well-intentioned responses that cause more harm
- How to listen without projecting your own feelings
- Staying present without taking control of the situation
- Where your role as a colleague ends here
- Handling disclosures with appropriate confidentiality
- Why boundaries protect you and your colleague
- What you should and should not do with what you know
- When to suggest formal support to a colleague
- How to make the suggestion without pushing them
- What formal support channels are available here
- How to support them through the process gently
- How harassment affects individuals over time
- Emotional and behavioural impacts to understand
- How harassment ripples across teams and culture
- Why your response as a peer genuinely matters
Outcomes
Build teams where affected employees get thoughtful, well-boundaried peer support. Outcomes that strengthen reporting culture and reduce the risk of mishandled responses.
Colleagues who respond well to disclosures make reporting safer. This course gives employees the skills to be the kind of first point of contact that encourages rather than discourages formal reporting, building a culture where speaking up feels less risky because the people around you know how to handle it.
A well-intentioned but poorly handled response can cause as much damage as silence. This course addresses the most common peer response mistakes directly, giving employees the knowledge to support a colleague in ways that are helpful, boundaried, and unlikely to make the situation harder to resolve.
Colleagues who know how to guide someone to formal support without pushing them away make earlier escalation more likely. This course equips employees to have the conversations that move concerns from silence into the right channels, reducing the time that issues go unaddressed and unresolved.
Inconsistent peer responses create uneven experiences for people affected by harassment. This course gives every employee the same foundation of knowledge and skill, so that whoever a colleague turns to first, they receive a response that is calm, considered, and genuinely useful rather than accidental.