In the first half of 2025, calls to the ACAS helpline asking for advice on workplace harassment rose to 5,583, up from 4,001 in the same window of 2024, a 39% increase. The figures came out under a Freedom of Information request by Nockolds and were reported by People Management. They cover the first full year of the Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act 2010) Act 2023, which has been in force since October 2024.
The legal bar is about to move again. From October 2026, under the Employment Rights Act 2025, the duty escalates from taking reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment to taking all reasonable steps. Liability for third-party harassment, by customers, clients, patients and contractors, is reintroduced. Tribunals can already increase compensation awards by up to 25% where an employer has failed the preventative duty. The EHRC has put its 8-step guide into the foreground as a working indicator of what the higher bar is going to look like in practice.
Why It Is Not A Policy Problem
The temptation, when the bar rises, is to rewrite the policy. New paragraph on third-party conduct, refreshed wording on the complaints route, updated training matrix in the LMS. None of it is wrong. None of it, on its own, is the thing the tribunal asks about.
What tribunals look for is evidence that the people in the room would actually behave differently in a real moment. A line manager who hears a remark in a client meeting and lets it pass, the senior leader who replies to a complaint by asking whether the complainant might be over-reading the situation, the colleague who decides not to escalate because nothing happened last time, all of these are behaviour failures, not policy failures. The policy was there. The training was logged. The behaviour was the default one.
This is the harder shape of the duty. "All reasonable steps" reads as an audit standard but lands as a behaviour standard. The ACAS call volume, 5,583 in six months, is the first sign that the gap between what organisations think their culture does and what employees actually experience is becoming visible in a way it was not five years ago.
Why The Default Training Will Not Carry It
The standard preventative-duty response, even now, is content-heavy and rehearsal-light. A 30-minute online module on the definition of harassment. A revised whistleblowing flowchart. A live webinar with a Q&A. Completion rates climb to 96%. Behaviour in real meetings does not change.
The mechanism is well established. Roediger and Karpicke (2006), in Psychological Science, found that being tested on material lifts long-term retention by roughly 50% compared with re-reading. Most preventative-duty training is the re-reading kind. By the time the awkward moment arrives, at the offsite, in the client lunch, in the back of the team chat, very little of what was taught is accessible, and the bystander defaults to whatever the bystander defaulted to before.
Ericsson's Peak (2016) on deliberate practice makes the same point in a different vocabulary. The first-reaction behaviours that decide whether a moment is interrupted, naming what just happened, stepping in without escalating, supporting the person on the receiving end, only change with focused, feedback-rich repetition against a clear behavioural target. Awareness, on its own, does not move them.
What Actually Closes The Gap
In Sidestream's own academic behaviour-change work, building on research from UCL, Cambridge and Bocconi, participants who learned a communication skill through immersive role-play scored roughly 20% higher on observed behaviour than participants who learned the same content through video or slide-show training. The participants who watched a video felt confident. Their observed behaviour did not match the self-report. We design the self-report out by measuring the behaviour.
Applied to the October bar, the format is small group, professional actor playing the client whose comment crosses the line, the colleague who minimises, the manager who waits for it to blow over. Three or four full conversations, replayed against named behavioural anchors. By the third rehearsal, the bystander move that the policy assumes will happen is actually the first move in the room. That is the evidence a tribunal can read, and that the EHRC's eight-step guide is pointing at.
What We Do About It
Our immersive simulations and manager workshops are designed for exactly the moments the preventative duty will be tested in, the offsite, the client meeting, the team chat, the after-work drink. The work is short, intense and behaviourally measured. Read also our piece on the April 2026 speak-up rules for the whistleblowing layer, or our piece on the £28.5 billion ACAS conflict figure for the wider cost of unaddressed friction.
"All reasonable steps" is not a policy phrase. It is a rehearsal phrase, and the rehearsal has to happen before the moment, not after.
The organisations that pass the October bar without incident will not be the ones with the longest policy. They will be the ones whose people have practised the bystander move often enough that it is the first move, not the second thought. Book a call to look at what that rehearsal would look like for your teams.
Book a free 30-minute diagnostic call → or read about our research-backed approach.