New Study: What 2026 Data Reveals About Reporting Workplace Harassment

Nearly a quarter (22%) of employees who witness harassment never report it. But among those who do, 38% say they were dissatisfied with their employer’s response. The data highlights a trust gap that shapes whether employees speak up at all.

Those numbers come from Traliant’s The State of Workplace Harassment: 2026 Findings, which examines reporting workplace harassment and employee confidence in how employers respond when concerns are raised.

Where Harassment Risks Are Highest

Nearly half (46%) of Gen Z employees say they’ve witnessed workplace harassment – and 33% report experiencing it firsthand. Those rates exceed every other generation in the survey, suggesting that problematic behavior is showing up early in employees’ careers rather than fading with time.

Industry differences are sharper still. In customer-facing environments such as hotels, restaurants, and bars, 50% of employees report witnessing harassment and 29% say they have experienced it themselves. In office-based roles, those figures fall to 32% and 17%.

Public-facing work brings familiar risk factors: less control over interactions, fewer managers present, and a higher likelihood that harassment comes from customers rather than co-workers. The reality is, reporting systems designed around office-based work don’t always translate well to frontline roles.

Reporting frameworks can’t assume desk access or constant oversight, so frontline roles need options that work even when HR isn’t nearby.

Why Employees Decide Not to Report

Employees know that once a complaint is raised, there’s no rewind button – so reporting harassment is a risk decision.

In the survey, retaliation concerns show up early in that calculation. Five percent of employees say fear of retaliation would stop them from reporting harassment at all. Another 6% report that they’d stay silent because they don’t expect their employer to take effective action. Those aren’t tentative answers. They reflect decisions made before HR ever hears about an issue and directly undermine the effectiveness of any formal complaint process. 

Among employees who have gone through the process of reporting workplace harassment, nearly four in 10 say their employer’s response left them either not at all satisfied (23%) or not very satisfied (15%). That experience sticks and spreads informally, shaping how others think about speaking up.

Employee views of how employers handle harassment reports vary by industry. In manufacturing, dissatisfaction is most pronounced, with one-third of employees who reported harassment saying they weren’t at all satisfied with their employer’s response. In hotels, restaurants, and bars, dissatisfaction is split, with 26% saying they weren’t very satisfied and 18% saying they weren’t at all satisfied. Retail shows a similar result, with one in four employees saying they weren’t at all satisfied with how their employer handled the report.

Office settings perform better, but not enough to call it solved. Even there, 17% say they weren’t at all satisfied and another 14% say the employer’s response missed the mark.

How Employees Prefer Reporting Workplace Harassment

When employees do consider reporting harassment, comfort varies widely by channel.

The good news: HR remains the most trusted option, with 59% of employees saying they would feel comfortable reporting there. 

Managers follow at 53%, though that depends heavily on the supervisor relationship.

Other reporting channels give employees reporting options they feel safe using. Forty percent say they would feel comfortable using an anonymous option, while 29% would use an online reporting form. In addition, 20% said they’d feel comfortable reporting to legal or compliance teams and executive leadership.

A smaller group remains entirely shut out. Four percent of employees don’t feel comfortable reporting workplace harassment through any channel. When reporting processes are built primarily around managers, but employee comfort skews toward HR or anonymous routes, incident data will remain incomplete.

“When reports of misconduct go unaddressed, organizations risk reinforcing cycles of fear and tolerating harassment,” said Elissa Rossi, Vice President of Compliance Services at Traliant.

What Training and Systems Miss

Training matters, but not all training does the same work.

Across generations, most employees report receiving baseline instruction. Roughly two-thirds of younger and mid-career workers say they’ve had code-of-conduct and harassment prevention training in the past year. Exposure drops among Boomers, with 53% reporting code of conduct training and 48% receiving harassment prevention training.

More applied content is far less common. Only about one-third of Gen Z employees report receiving bystander intervention training, and exposure drops below 20% for older groups. Training on microaggressions is rarer still across all generations.

The generational split is clearest in those who receive no training at all. Only 7% of Gen Z employees report receiving no workplace training in the past year. That figure rises for Millennials (13%), Gen X (15%), and nearly one in four Boomers (24%).

When training is missing or inconsistent, employees misunderstand how reporting works. They base decisions on what they’ve been taught, not on what technically exists. In frontline roles, that misunderstanding cuts deeper. Employees may assume access to HR is limited or remote. Reporting may feel like it has to go through a direct supervisor they work alongside every day. Follow-up may seem informal or dependent on who is on shift.

Office-based settings tend to operate differently. Access to HR is more visible. Reporting channels are easier to find. Processes feel more standardized. That difference shows up in satisfaction data, with office employees reporting stronger outcomes after complaints, while manufacturing, retail, and customer-facing roles report higher dissatisfaction.

The end result is uneven reporting of workplace harassment, especially outside office settings.

With federal guidance in flux, internal clarity around reporting and response matters more than ever. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s decision to rescind its 2024 harassment guidance raises new uncertainty about expectations, leaving employers with less external direction and more pressure to get internal reporting and response right.

What Makes Reporting More Likely to Work

• Set and enforce clear expectations. Zero-tolerance only works when leaders model it and enforce it consistently. Employees watch how reliably standards are applied, not how they’re written.
• Make reporting easy to use and safe. Remove friction from reporting. Employees need clear options that feel confidential and protected from blowback, including clear messaging that retaliation is prohibited and will not be tolerated. When that protection isn’t clearly communicated, issues are far less likely to reach HR. 
• Respond clearly and without delay. How employers handle the first report sets the tone for every report that follows. Even when investigations take time, clarity around timelines and next steps helps prevent frustration and disengagement. 
• Update training to reflect real situations. Shift time away from generic policy refreshers toward bystander intervention, microaggression scenarios, and clear walk-throughs of how reporting works in practice, especially for frontline roles with limited access to HR. 

The challenge ahead for HR is building reporting systems that employees trust enough to use early, before small concerns escalate into organizational risk.