Recognizing Sexual Harassment in the Workplace

Last updated on September 12, 2014

As a business owner, you have a responsibility to your employees to create a positive and safe working environment for them, and to ensure that your place of business is free from sexual harassment of any kind. Besides just making sense in terms of keeping employees happy and keeping productivity high, it is also extremely important from a legal standpoint. If sexual harassment occurs in your company, you will suffer the negative consequences of poor employee morale, reduced productivity and potential legal action against you. There are a set of laws that prohibit both gender discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace. There is a federal law (Title VII of the Civil Rights Act) that prohibits sexual harassment and each of the individual states also has its own laws against sexual harassment.

What is Sexual Harassment?

Sexual harassment can be defined as unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors and any other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature when: Submission to such conduct relates to the employment status or eligibility for participation in educational programs; Or, agreement to participate in or rejection of such conduct is used as a qualification for employment or academic decisions affecting the individual; Or, such conduct has the intent of unreasonably interfering with an employee’s work performance or student’s academic performance creating a hostile or offensive learning or professional environment.

Some examples include repeated sexual innuendo or humor, written contact of a sexual nature, sexual propositions of any kind, coerced or unwelcome touching, display of pornographic material, and any coerced sexual favors or intercourse.

How to Recognize Sexual Harassment

As a business owner, it is important to pay attention to your employees and their behavior, observing relationships and interactions that take place. Creating an open door policy for your employees to talk to you and bring up concerns is also critical. If someone is feeling uncomfortable with a certain person or situation, the sooner you know about it the better. You don’t want it to escalate into something that can damage employees and your company as a whole.

How to Prevent Sexual Harassment

While it is impossible to completely control the actions of another person, you can certainly do some things in your company to help prevent sexual harassment from occurring. The first thing you can do is draft a sexual harassment policy and adopt it. This should be a clear policy that outlines acceptable and unacceptable behavior. It should also contain procedures for reporting sexual harassment claims. Basically, your employees should be clear as to the company’s position on and intolerance of sexual harassment. The clearer you are, the less you will have to worry about misinterpretation.

Training employees is a key part of sexual harassment prevention. Investing in the education of your employees is important, and helping them understand the consequences of sexual harassment is critical for the success and longevity of your company. WeComply offers sexual harassment training for your employees. Give us a call today and let us tell you about our training and how it can help you prevent sexual harassment in your workplace.