Skip sexual harassment training in Latin America

My final posting about my trip to Brazil is about "Sexual Harassment". We had a number of conversations with people who were in HR, Sales, Marketing and Operations about the topic of Sexual Harassment. It was fascinating to me that this should be a topic that was top of mind for most people as we talked about differences between doing business in North and South America.

As most of us who have been in business for any length of time know, this is a "routine topic" for North American companies. It mostly is a "cya" for businesses to make sure that we all go through regular sexual harassment training. It usually goes something like this: you receive annoying email after email from the HR department that you have to take this computer-based training/certification on sexual harassment or else!

I don't think that anyone in North America would consider Sexual Harassment a laughing matter. However, our counterparts who work for North American companies think that it is a little over the top. The the whole idea of not touching someone is absolutely unthinkable in a culture that is all about close relationships and touching. And so, the folks in Brazil do take the training and answer the way they know the company would like them to and then go ahead and give their colleague a big hug for accomplishing a job well-done.