Elizabeth Owens Bille has a passion for law, policy and human resources. Before she became a lawyer, she focused on public policy at the state and federal level for the Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM). After law school, she became a labor and employment attorney at Hogan & Hartson (now Hogan Lovells), and then worked as an adviser for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Bille later returned to SHRM, where she eventually rose to general counsel.

But with the advent of the #Me Too movement, however, she wanted to find ways to prevent harassment and was given an opportunity to help companies do so at EVERFI Inc., a company that partners with companies that want to give broad-scale training to their workforces on issues such as harassment and discrimination.

Bille, senior director of harassment prevention at EVERFI since August, spoke with Corporate Counsel about preventing harassment, how data plays a role in her job, and about how preventing harassment should be of more concern to companies than merely responding to it. Here are excerpts from that conversation, edited for brevity and clarity.

Corporate Counsel: What prompted your job switch from SHRM to EVERFI?

Elizabeth Bille: As attorneys we tend to be laser-focused on legal compliance and legal standards. However, when the #Me Too movement happened, I read and heard so much concern that maybe the traditional methods of combating harassment were not as effective as they should be. I was incredibly intrigued by: What next? What would be effective in preventing harassment in the work place? That led me to EVERFI.

EVERFI is an education technology company. We are unique in that we have a prevention-based focus for tackling critical social issues. We leverage public health frameworks, such as bystander intervention techniques, leveraging culture to change behavior. This behavior-based focus, I think, is the key to solving the harassment problem.

Explain your role in helping companies prevent harassment?

My role has a few focuses. As an EVERFI subject matter expert, I work with our product team to make sure training that we give to our customers really has all of the cutting-edge techniques that we know can be transformative in changing workplace behavior. I also have been convening groups of HR leaders, compliance executives and other executive leaders to talk about these new approaches to demonstrate that this can really be effective, by moving the company away from a compliance-based response focus to harassment, to one that prevents it from happening in the first place.

I also talk to organizations about the critical value of data in making harassment based programs efficient.

How does EVERFI use data to prevent harassment?

In terms of data, especially as in-house counsel, it can be a bit scary to ask employees questions about the conditions that are conducive to harassment. The truth is that if we don't understand what the conditions are in our workplace that are leading to harassment, we can be very exposed to liability. Truly it's better to know internally before the public knows or the courts know externally.

We encourage employers to use climate surveys as a part of the workplace training experience, and to ask questions of their employees about knowing where to report instances of concerning behavior. Would they feel comfortable stepping in if they saw something concerning?  If the answers to those are “no,” that gives the organization some actionable data to use in their proactive steps in their harassment prevention efforts. You could communicate where those hotlines are to report; you could increase training on bystander intervention if you have data showing that people don't know how to do it [report harassment.]

What are some misconceptions about workplace harassment?

I think one of the misconceptions is that the focus should be on the legal definition of harassment and not on the behavior that will get you to harassment if left unchecked. We in the legal profession tend to focus on the definition. Was the incident severe and pervasive enough to meet the definition of harassment? And if not, maybe it doesn't need to be addressed. There tends to be a focus on our training, our policies and holding employees accountable on whether or not they fell on one side of the legal definition or the other.

In order to stop harassment before it occurs, we need to focus on behavior that falls short of harassment such as disrespect, bullying and other abusive behavior. If left unchecked, that will embolden the potential harasser to continue and not only will it escalate into legal harassment, but you've also damaged culture along the way.