Sexual Harassment

Preventing Sexual Harassment in the Workplace

• What effective measures can a company take to prevent or eliminate sexual harassment in the workplace?

Introduction

• First and foremost, sexual harassment is not only wrong, but is also very illegal.

• Title IIV of the Civil Right Act of 1964 protects employees and defines sexual harassment as unwelcome, unwanted and unsolicited advances that are sexual in nature.

Executive Summary

• There is nothing more frustrating for organizations than to watch their profits walk out the door due to sexual harassment incidents.

Fortunately, there are available tools that can be used as a solution to minimize or eliminate these type of losses.

Protect Your Investment

• Employees aren’t just workers who make your organizations money, they’re people with feelings like you and I, so let’s protect them.

Findings of Secondary Resources

Federal Law does not make it mandatory for organizations to provide sexual harassment training to non-supervisory workers, but it’s in the best interest of all companies to do so. • Support: According to the EEOC in 2010, there were 11,717

sexual harassment charges filed and that 64% of organization received at least one sexual harassment claim in the previous two years.

Citation Sources: (Gottwals, 2006) (Greenwald, 2011)

Survey Findings

Have you ever received sexual harassment training?

If an organization used an advertised zero-tolerance policy, do you feel that it would be more effective than training?

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

Yes

No

7

2

4

108

13

11

4

Sexual Harassment Survey

Yes No

Conclusion

• Sexual harassment will continue to evolve and become more difficult to eliminate, so organizations must act. Sexual harassment is a behavior that is difficult to eliminate, but there are effective paths that organizations can take to prevent incidents from occurring or becoming a larger issue. I hope that all your organizations take this data into consideration when it comes to educating and training employees and on occasion utilize the option of terminations as the tools to develop a healthy harassment free environment.

RecommendationsI. We need to protect our employees and back them up when they make a

report and it shouldn’t matter how valuable the alleged harasser is either. Workers are people; like myself, they have feelings just like all of you, so let’s start showing them by disciplining and holding those accountable for their inappropriate actions.

II. Those who receive the report should be sensitive and respond quickly to all incidents regardless of the magnitude of the incident. This approach alone has proved to reduce costs dramatically.

III. Of course providing a strong clear policy that is written in simple English without all the jargon is a must, but that has shown to be quite inefficient. The real solution is to start terminating those who have been positively identified as chronic sexual harassers that refuse to change after being formally counseled.

Prevention Starts With You!