- Workplace Culture Research•What data from 2024 signals for 2025
From the very start, Emtrain has been on a mission to create healthier organizations by developing peoples’ skills in ethics, respect and inclusion. At Emtrain we are committed to reducing organizational risk and helping you build a strong culture by making the opaque transparent. We provide actionable data driven insights and benchmark your organizational health in the foundational culture areas of ethics, respect, and inclusion.
Janine Yancey, started her career as an employment lawyer, representing tech companies in San Francisco. She grew frustrated at the limitations of the legal system to solve workplace problems because the system encouraged employers to focus on defending claims rather than doing the hard work to solve the culture issues, causing those claims. Typical “check-the-box” compliance training didn’t address any real organizational problems because an annual “information dump” on complex topics like ethics, harassment, and bias couldn’t move the needle on any real culture issues.
In 2016, Janine realized that demographics and social norms were changing and she predicted what became known as the #MeToo movement in an early 2017 article published on Medium — months before the #MeToo movement. Janine realized changes were needed to enable employers to solve systemic culture problems: (1) Employers and employees must treat ethics, respect and inclusion as competencies, requiring ongoing development and practice – not topics you can learn by reading a policy once a year; (2) Employers and employees need a framework to identify and understand the core behavioral dynamics that cause ethics, respect and inclusion and (3) Employers need visibility to the presence of those core behaviors in their workforce so they can assess the concealed risk of their cultural issues.
So 11 years after jumping into Emtrain full time and fueled by her conviction that our changing society needed a different solution, Janine raised $2M in seed funding to develop a platform that could deliver ongoing culture education and development, provide a framework and shared language to make workforce behaviors visible and diagnose early culture issues so employers and employees could identify and address early warning signs before they turned into culture problems — a workforce and a societal problem that Janine was and is uniquely qualified to solve.
Emtrain is certified as a Women’s Business Enterprise (WBE) through the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC), the nation’s largest third party certifier of businesses owned and operated by women in the US.
In 2018, Janine Yancey provided expert testimony for CA’s SB 1343 – the expanded harassment training law for all employees, not just managers. Here’s a video of Janine’s testimony. Notably — Janine ensured there was an “ask the expert” feature for employees to safely ask questions in online programs — which is key to creating an effective learning experience. Also, Janine recommended reducing the time requirement for non-supervisors to 1 hour (rather than 2 hours).
In September 2020, Janine again provided practical feedback to California’s administrative body (the Fair Employment and Housing Council – FEHC) regarding the efficacy to the learning experience if CA allowed employers to provide training annually rather than every other year. In short — a shorter course (60 minutes) delivered annually, is a more effective learning method than a two hour course delivered episodically (every other year.).
Further, an annual cadence helps multi-state employers create one program that can be delivered across their U.S. workforce and comply with several competing training regulations from New York, Connecticut, Illinois, California and soon — New Jersey.
