Is it harassment?

February 03, 2014, by HR à la carte | Dealing with Difficult Employees|Work Environment and Policies

Harassment.  It’s a word that is bandied around quite a bit but do we really understand what it actually means?  Many employees use the word to describe many different behaviours, many of which are not considered harassing in a strict legal sense.  However, when employers hear the word harassment they often freeze, not knowing what to do or how to proceed.  Without the benefit of training, both employers and employees have misconceptions of what constitutes harassment.  In our experience of years of conducting workplace investigations, what is termed as harassing behaviour is in many cases co-workers not playing nicely in the sandbox together. 

In a work environment, we often have to work with people with whom we don’t always see eye-to-eye.  In fact, there are even “bad apples” in the work place we have to deal with.  Miscommunications, misunderstandings and assumptions that are left to fester often spill over into a “making a mountain out of a molehill” situation whereby one party cries foul and cites a formal complaint of harassment.  Investigations are often costly, especially when a third party has to be brought in to conduct it, and during the investigation all parties are on edge. 

The old adage an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure is so true in the case of maintaining respectful work environments.  Having a workplace harassment policy and conducting proactive training for all managers and employees on preventing harassment and defining what a respectful workplace looks like goes a long way to preventing the scenario described above.   It provides the basic tools of dealing with miscommunications and allows employees to better understand when they are truly experiencing harassing behaviour versus behaviour that they may not like or appreciate, but is not harassment.   Training will also provide the basic tools to management to not freeze as soon as they hear the word harassment, but to clearly and logically peel away the layers of the onion to get at the root cause of the issue and professionally deal with it. 

There will always be cases where co-workers do not get along for whatever reason.  By planning and training for that eventuality employers will be able to sort through and prevent all the chaff so that they can effectively deal with the genuine harassment cases if and when they do crop up.

Our next blog will talk about how to conduct an effective investigation.

Other items of interest:

How to Conduct an Effective Workplace Investigation

Bad Apples in the Workplace Part I

Bad Apples in the Workplace Part II

Strategies for Dealing with Difficult Employees