4 Simple Ways to Prevent a Hostile Work Environment
As an employer or supervisor, it’s your responsibility to create a work environment free of all types of harassment, including verbal, physical, and sexual harassment. If you want your employees to do their jobs well, they need to feel safe and respected when dealing with their colleagues daily.
If you don’t deal with and actively prevent a hostile work environment, you could be liable if you or one of your employees is accused of harassing another employee. Reduce all types of harassment in the workplace by setting and enforcing strict guidelines, communicating effectively with your employees, and establishing a means for dealing with and responding to harassment complaints.
Clearly Identify Harassment
An incident in the workplace, such as a word, phrase, or interaction of some kind, might seem entirely innocuous for one person, while another person might interpret these same events as inappropriate behavior. To prevent this confusion, you must create a guide for identifying and preventing harassment in the workplace, so everyone on your team will be on the same page.
This guide should include types of verbal harassment, including words or phrases meant to discriminate against an individual based on race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, age, or national origin. This might also include jokes, pranks, bringing inappropriate material to work, and non-consensual touching.
Communicate Harassment Policy
Once you’ve established what constitutes harassment in the workplace, you need to effectively communicate these policies to your employees by circulating an updated copy of the company’s workplace guidelines or an employee handbook, holding a company-wide meeting, and making sexual harassment training mandatory for all employees. These policies should also encourage your employees to speak up if they witness one employee harassing another in the workplace.
Establish a System for Dealing with Harassment Complaints
Any harassment guidelines should also include a clearly defined system for dealing with and responding to complaints. This includes designating an individual or department responsible for dealing with complaints and setting up a due process system for investigating the claim.
Everyone in the workplace should feel safe and comfortable when coming forward with a complaint. The company should never retaliate against an employee for reporting a concern in good faith. Any form of retaliation, such as excluding them, passing them over for a promotion, demoting them, or even changing their schedule to make life difficult, not only puts the company at risk of a lawsuit but is also extremely damaging to a company’s culture.
When taking action against an employee accused of harassment, it’s best to use a zero-tolerance policy. Suppose claims of harassment against an employee appear to be credible. In that case, that guilty party or parties should be fired immediately, without exception, even if such a decision has negative repercussions for the company. As the employer, your employees will look to your Compliance, Human Resources, and Legal teams to swiftly, fairly, transparently, and consistently investigate and deal with claims of harassment. If you do not have an anti-harassment program or need a good overhaul, your company is at risk.
4 Simple Steps
To help you get started, here are four things you should start putting into place as soon as possible:
1. POLICY
A zero-tolerance policy will help ensure employees know that respect in the workplace is part of the company’s culture. This policy should state things like:
Every incident of harassment will be made a top priority by HR and Compliance.
The investigation will start the day the harassment incident is reported.
If harassment is confirmed, the individual who conducted the harassment will be terminated immediately.
If an employee from a vendor is the one doing the harassing, then your company should recommend to their leadership team that they should be terminated and, at minimum, removed from the account. If the vendor refuses to take appropriate action, your company should fire that vendor.
2. REPORTING
If an employee is not comfortable communicating directly with the person harassing them or if they speak directly to the person harassing them and the behavior does not stop, then the employee being harassed needs to be able to report their concern easily. Here are two examples of harassment reporting channels:
Third-party Employee Hotline – This will allow employees to report their concerns anonymously if they choose.
Directly to Human Resources, Compliance, their manager, or a member of the leadership team. If an incident of harassment is reported to a manager or member of the leadership team, they should be educated on how to document the concern and know whom to send it to in HR or Compliance. Your management team must know not to overreact or underreact to concerns about harassment. They need to have a consistent process to follow every time they receive a concern.
3. TRAINING
If you do not have an employment lawyer, hire one or find a knowledgeable consultant to work with. All employees should receive harassment training upon hire and annually. Additionally, managers should receive manager-specific harassment training and don’t forget to train them when they get promoted to management. The tone starts with your leadership and management team. Make sure they understand what harassment is and what to do when an incident is reported to them.
4. COMMUNICATE
Harassment training once a year is not enough; you must keep the message and the conversation going. Remind employees what harassment is, how to address the harassment, and how to report it. For example, some employees may know what to do if someone touches them in a way that makes them uncomfortable.
Make sure your employees know what to do if a coworker puts their hand on their shoulder and they are uncomfortable with it. Make sure employees are mindful of their coworker’s physical boundaries. In other words, help them know their boundaries and what to do when boundaries are crossed.
The ETHIX360 blog brings you weekly updates on all things human resources and compliance.
MEET THE AUTHOR
Stephanie Farmer is a seasoned ethics and compliance (E&C) professional. She has earned an MA in both Business and Professional and Applied Ethics and is a graduate of The Ethics & Compliance Initiative Managing Ethics in an Organization Program. Prior to and during her E&C career, Stephanie served in the United States Marine Corps Reserves and the North Carolina Air National Guard.
ABOUT ETHIX360
At ETHIX360, our goal is simple: to provide an affordable, flexible, and comprehensive answer to employee communication, policy management, corporate training and case management on issues related to corporate ethics, code of conduct, fraud, bribery, and workplace violence.
