Joint diagnosis

An ODC approach begins with a diagnosis—specifically a joint or mutual diagnosis process that engages multiple stakeholders to make sense of the challenges the organization is facing (Burke & Noumair, Reference Burke and Noumair2015). The people engaged in the diagnosis are not limited to experts with “the” answer (e.g., HR managers or external consultants who are tasked to deliver training). Rather, organizational members participate as architects to identify and design the change that is needed. Their involvement generates commitment to the change effort that makes real change more likely. Further, joint diagnosis brings a larger and wider range of information to the problem. It can involve interviews, focus groups, climate surveys, and on-site observations, engaging a wide range of stakeholders across organizational levels. This is critical because a clear view of the problem is only achieved by integrating information from stakeholders across all organizational levels. The use of a structured, diagnostic process that includes all members of the organization is likely to strengthen and deepen the organization’s understanding of its challenges and approaches to solving them, particularly around issues where employees are otherwise hesitant to come forward. Importantly, this joint diagnostic process is deliberately broader and more comprehensive than the needs analysis that is often highlighted in the training literature because a needs analysis is always an input to later training, whereas a joint diagnostic process is not.

Culture change

An ODC perspective focuses on fixing the system within which behavior occurs. Although climate and culture are related, an ODC perspective targets culture (the deeply embedded assumptions of organizations that are reflected in their values and beliefs) that may contribute to climates (shared perceptions and attitudes that individuals have). Most often, culture change requires changing the organization’s structure and practices to encourage, support, and reward desirable behaviors (Golom, Reference Golom and Hawley2015). With respect to sexual harassment, culture change could be achieved by adopting inclusive HR practices (e.g., recruitment, hiring, promotion, evaluation) that minimize status differentials across employees, increasing inclusive decision making and communication, and developing psychologically safe spaces for employees to share concerns around sexual harassment and other inappropriate behavior (Nishii & Rich, Reference Nishii, Rich, Ferdman and Deane2014). Culture change might also be achieved by coaching for inclusion—developing leaders who are open, available, and accessible to their employees, as inclusive leadership behaviors are likely to positively influence perceptions of inclusion and negatively influence experiences of mistreatment (Shore, Cleveland, & Sanchez, Reference Shore, Cleveland and Sanchez2018). This broad portfolio of interventions also expands the metrics by which an organization might measure success. In particular, viewed from an ODC perspective, the culture assessments and climate perceptions that Medeiros and Griffith (Reference Medeiros and Griffith2019) position as moderators (contextual variables that influence training transfer) become indicators of a successful change effort in their own right.

HR professionals need to recognize that successfully addressing sexual harassment and assault in their organizations is likely to involve more than a well-designed, best-practice training program. Engaging the entire system in diagnosing the problem, gathering information from a wide range of stakeholders, intervening at multiple levels of analysis, and transforming the organization’s underlying culture are more likely to produce lasting change. To truly eradicate sexual harassment and assault in an organization, HR professionals will need to embrace a bigger action agenda grounded in an ODC approach:

1. 1. Systematically collect data from a variety of organizational stakeholders to reveal contextual factors that may be contributing to instances of workplace sexual harassment and other forms of incivility and discrimination.

2. 2. Engage members of the organization in a dialogue to better understand that data and arrive at a shared diagnosis of contributors to the organization’s harassment problems (e.g., policies that inadvertently reward bad behavior).

3. 3. Develop interventions that target individual (e.g., leadership style), group (e.g., norms), and organizational factors (e.g., reward structures) that contribute to the problem and that might produce a change in the organization’s culture and climate.

4. 4. Build evaluation systems and adopt quality improvement metrics to track the progress of changes at the individual level (e.g., changes in knowledge and attitudes related to sexual harassment) as well as the organizational level (e.g., transparency with which sexual harassment grievances are managed, extent to which penalties are enforced).