If you’re looking for ways to reduce the potential for sexual harassment complaints in your workplace, it’s important to have and follow a solid anti-harassment policy and to make sure your supervisors are properly trained on how to recognize and respond to problem situations. It’s also important to make sure that your employees are properly trained on your company’s policies as well as on what sexual harassment is, what behaviors are inappropriate in the workplace and what they should do if they feel they have experienced harassment in the workplace.
Training is an important part of any sound sexual harassment prevention program. It’s advisable to put your employees through a sexual harassment training course periodically, whether you have had problems reported with this type of harassment or not. After all, the ideal way to deal with sexual harassment problems in the workplace is to proactively take steps to prevent them from ever happening. Managers should complete harassment prevention training specific to supervisory considerations, as well as the same, more general, anti-harassment training programs that are implemented for employees.
In addition to providing periodic training for all employees, additional training for certain individuals or departments may be necessary if you experience harassment complaints. Any time an allegation of sexual harassment is made, as an employer you have an obligation to conduct an immediate and full investigation to determine what took place and to take steps to make absolutely certain that any problems that exist in the workplace are corrected immediately.
In some situations where inappropriate actions did take place, training may be an appropriate corrective strategy to use. In others, conduct may be so egregious that the employees involved may need to be terminated from employment. Each situation has to be looked at separately and evaluated on its own merits. It’s essential for your company to take whatever steps necessary to ensure that the working environment is a positive one that is free from behaviors that represent sexual harassment and to be able to clearly demonstrate that the company took steps to prevent harassing behaviors from occurring and to put an immediate stop to an problem behaviors that did occur.
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