Support a Colleague Who Was Harassed

This template helps you practice responding to a colleague who discloses harassment and is unsure whether to report. The focus is on acknowledgment, emotional support, and practical next steps without pushing for a specific outcome. It is designed for the first conversation after the disclosure, when tone matters most. You are not practicing investigation or discipline decisions here.

People managers, HR partners, team leads, peer supporters, and bystanders who may be the first person a colleague tells. It is also useful for employee-resource-group facilitators and training teams building harassment-response practice. The learner should be someone who may need to respond calmly and appropriately in the moment. It is not limited to formal HR roles.

Run it during onboarding, manager training, and recurring harassment-response or bystander-intervention refreshers. It also works well after policy updates or when teams want to practice a specific reporting pathway. Because the scenario is conversational, it can be repeated with different learner objectives and difficulty levels. Repetition helps people build a steadier opening line and better follow-up questions.

No. It prepares someone to respond supportively and point the colleague toward the right options, but it does not replace your organization’s reporting, investigation, or case-management process. The learner should avoid promising outcomes they cannot control. The best use is to practice a calm handoff into the proper internal process.

The biggest mistakes are minimizing the experience, asking for unnecessary details, and jumping straight to reporting before the colleague is ready. Learners also often over-explain policy, sound skeptical, or make the conversation about their own discomfort. This template surfaces whether the learner can stay grounded, supportive, and nonjudgmental. It also reveals whether they can offer options without pressure.

You can change the setting, the relationship between the characters, the reporting channels, and the level of formality in the organization. You can also adjust the seniority of the person involved, the event type, and whether the colleague wants emotional support, documentation guidance, or help finding a reporting route. Keep the core situation specific so the roleplay still feels real. The persona should remain guarded and uncertain unless you want to test a different temperament.

Yes. You can adapt the next-step options to match your internal hotline, HR inbox, case-management workflow, or anonymous reporting channel. If your process includes a manager, HR partner, or ombuds contact, those can be named in the learner’s response. The template works well when paired with a policy link or reporting checklist. The key is to practice a clear handoff, not to overload the learner with every process detail.

Ad-hoc practice usually drifts into vague advice or a generic empathy exercise. This template gives the learner a concrete situation, a specific persona, a clear learner objective, and scored rubric criteria. That structure makes it easier to evaluate whether the response actually supported the colleague. It also makes retrying the scenario more useful because the feedback is tied to observable behaviors.