Workplace Culture and Sexual Harassment

The issue of sexual harassment is emotionally loaded because it is so personal and intense, and it seems every day another related headline dominates the media.  So many employers and employees are both confused and unsettled, illustrated by blurred professional boundaries and now third-party harassment is on the rise.   Bottom line, employers are responsible for providing employees with a safe, harassment-free work environment from any source. This includes supervisors, other employees, vendors and suppliers, and even guests.

So how do you make sustainable changes to your workplace culture in order to prevent internal staff and external colleagues/vendors/customers from acting in an inappropriate manner.

Carol’s 10 Top Tips to prevent workplace harassment and change workplace culture:

  1. Be careful with humor and think before you speak
  2. Question the appropriateness of your behavior
  3. Think about the effect of your behavior
  4. Report workplace/sexual harassment immediately
  5. When in doubt about whether your conduct constitutes sexual harassment, assume that it does
  6. Review anti-harassment policies and training procedures, both at the federal, state and local level
  7. Have a complaint intake process in place and take every complaint seriously
  8. Remember,  it is illegal for an employee to suffer retaliation due to reporting harassment or participating in an investigation
  9. Encourage civility at work; incivility, rudeness, and bad manners at work hinder productive communication and destroy workplace relationships and left unchecked lead to harassment
  10. Engage an EEOC approved trainer like Carol Flynn to create and deliver tailored sexual harassment and discrimination prevention training content.  What makes our content unique is that I am a behaviorist by training and not an attorney, so first I will clarify that any information contained in our content should not be construed as legal advice nor are we forming an attorney-client relationship.  But If we’re actually trying to change or eliminate the likelihood of sexual harassment in the workplace, that’s a different outcome altogether. That’s not a legal problem, that’s a behavior problem. “My content goes beyond checking off a box of legal requirements but can change lives for the better.”