Acknowledging sexual harassment at your workplace

The Equity Act of 2010 is aimed towards protecting individuals from discrimination and sexual harassment at the workplace.

What is sexual harassment?

An employee can claim for sexual harassment at their workplace if they experience any unwanted conduct of sexual nature or related to sex, anything that is said to be intimidating, hostile, degrading or offensive. A misconduct can be any one-off event rather than a series of repetitive incidents.

Moreover, an employer can even be held legally responsible if any person is seemingly punished for rejection of the conduct. However, most authorities in charge claim to never degrade or humiliate their employees or customers without purpose. As for the matter, the threshold to which it can be termed as harassment is relatively low.

Even though the comment that you made to an employee is a compliment or a pure joke, if it ever makes your employee uncomfortable, it amounts as an unwanted conduct or harassment. Jokes or comments made anywhere (be it spoken, shared on an email or on WhatsApp groups or other forums) can be termed offensive and unwanted.

Any act such as asking your employee out for dinner or for movies can count as harassment and moreover any mistreating behaviour for declining the invitation can be counted as unlawful.

The key factor to assess whether the environment is uncomfortable or the conduct was unwanted is the observation of an individual who has raised the complaint.

Taking all the reasonable steps

Employers are legally responsible for all the actions of their workers, even if they are aware about the actions or not. Consider the following example,

A situation where the employer is legally responsible for a claim which he is aware about, two employees having a relationship that ends on bed terms and one party is forcing the other to reconcile.

One of the major defence steps that any employer can take during such a claim is that they are taking all the necessary steps to prevent and prohibit such conduct even in future.

For this purpose, an employer should be proactive. This can be done by

• Training and implementing policies that are regularly updated
• Workers should be well informed on how they are supposed to voice and face any issues that they have
• Complaints should be completely investigated
• Disciplinary actions should be taken right away (especially when any employee is found to be engaged in sexual harassment in the workplace).

However, one thing to look out for is that these actions do not disturb the friendly and relaxed environment of the company. Employers should put in efforts to create a working environment that mirrors the image of the society that people hope to live in.