It’s your responsibility as a business owner or manager to make sure the workplace is as safe as possible for everybody. This is often thought of in terms of injuries or illnesses. But, it goes far beyond just making sure that people don’t slip and fall or get sick.
It needs to be safe from sexual harassment, as well. Sexual harassment is not only wrong, it also creates a toxic work environment which makes it difficult for people to work happily and productively. Nobody deserves to feel uncomfortable due to being sexually harassed at work.
In this article, we will go over some of the ways you can keep your workplace free from sexual harassment incidences.
In depth training
It takes a lot of training to make sure that employees don’t do anything that can be construed as sexual harassment. Unfortunately, many people that actually don’t mean any harm are the ones that need the most training. They may not think what they are doing is causing somebody to feel harassed, so they need to be taught where the line is.
Joking around is one thing, but it can often devolve into a situation in which a Los Angeles sexual harassment lawyer gets involved. It needs to be clearly defined exactly what it is so people know that they can’t make certain kinds of jokes or that they have to maintain a professional atmosphere.
There should be at least a yearly training session in which all departments take part so it can be ingrained in the workplace culture that there is a zero-tolerance policy of sexual harassment.
Make it easy to report
An employee shouldn’t have to wonder what they need to do to report an incident. Nor should they have to jump through hoops to satisfy some complicated bureaucratic procedure.
Reporting should be one of the easiest things that they can do and should be clearly outlined in the training as to how to proceed when they have a complaint.
Some people may feel unsafe by reporting even though the process is easy. You can implement an anonymous reporting system so that the offender is dealt with and the accuser doesn’t open themself up to retaliation. Fear of losing their job is one of the biggest reasons that people decline to report a harassment incident.
Be proactive
Rather than wait for complaints to come in, actively gauge the environment in which people are working. Send out an anonymous survey asking people if they have felt sexually harassed in the last 30 days. Then take the survey results and analyze if the workplace is toxic or not.
If there are a high number of incidents then take some measures to put a stop to them. You’ll need to overhaul your training and reporting to make sure that this toxic work environment doesn’t continue. Whatever you had been doing to this point wasn’t working so it needs to be changed.
