Harassment is dangerous to human nature, physically and mentally. It is very important to address any matter that is toxic to your health in any way and take safety measures to stop any type of harassment. And when it’s the matter at the workplace, there should be strong policies and thorough workplace investigations to handle these matters. Strict workplace investigations bound the employees to avoid prohibited behaviours.
UNDERSTANDING WHAT IS WORKPLACE HARASSMENT
To fight harassment and bullying in the workplace, it is first important to understand what type of harassment someone is facing when they say they are facing workplace harassment and what different types of harassment people can come across in their workplace environment.
There can be several discriminations that people come across that come under the umbrella of harassment in the workplace.
Harassment in the workplace can include:
Racial harassment:
In racial harassment, someone can be seen as treated differently because of their race. Racial harassment may include physical abuse, derogatory name-calling, racist joke and verbal threats.
Gender harassment:
It is when someone is treated differently because of their gender. Gender harassment may include gender-specific derogatory name-calling, unwanted touch, inappropriate staring, and invading personal space.
Sexual harassment:
It is when someone is being harassed in terms of unwanted sexual behaviour. Sexual harassment may include flirting, making inappropriate or sex-oriented jokes, unwanted touching or touching someone without their will, sexual assault and rape.
Physical harassment:
Physical harassment is when someone uses physical violence against someone or threatens them physically. It may include hitting, shoving, kicking, physical frightening, throwing stuff and alarming behaviour.
Age harassment:
It is when someone is treated differently because of their age. It usually happens when someone is a younger employee. It may include offensive physical gestures, age-based comments, and demeaning jokes.
Disability harassment:
It happens to someone who is disabled in any way. Disability harassment may include ridiculing, threatening, unnecessary touching, abusive remarks about their disability and invading personal space.
Bullying:
Bullying may include yelling, cursing, offensive language, physical attacks and humiliation.
And there are many more examples of workplace harassment.
WHAT YOU CAN DO TO STOP ANY TYPE OF WORKPLACE HARASSMENT?
There are so many things one can do to stop workplace harassment and one of them is the policies and strong workplace investigations that play a crucial part to tackle these matters.
The first and the most important thing you can do is to address when you think someone or a group of individuals is being disrespectful, humiliating, making inappropriate jokes, or cursing or yelling at you. It is normal for a person to first ignore these incidents and consider them that these are one-time things but when you ignore this, it kind of becomes the habit of the other individual to treat you that way. So, it is crucial to address it the first time when it happens and not to ignore these situations.
The second step can be workplace investigations which comes after when you have addressed the person and made it clear that his or her behaviour is not welcomed. But in some cases, if you think that you can’t address the person because of any reason, you can file a complaint to the company with HR. By doing this you are legally taking the matter and the company will help you with it.
The company should immediately respond to the complaint and must start a workplace investigation to know what has happened and upon finding the result the company should take appropriate measures to reprimand the responsible person or group.
Any workplace must have strict and clear policies and processes for the workplace investigations to conduct these important matters and regulate the health of the organization.
The policies should be made clear the points are given below.
• How an employee should file a complaint. (What are the steps)
• There should be numerous reporting mediums so that they do not have to inform any incident to the offender.
• There should be a clarified list of consequences and sanctions for harassment.
The company should clarify in their policies what types of behaviours are prohibited so that employees should avoid the prohibited behaviours and after the workplace investigations, no one can play the victim. There should be easy-to-follow processes to file a report for such complaints and employees should be trained on how to handle different harassment situations if they see one is facing and what to do when someone is not following the company’s policies properly and report these situations so that workplace investigations must be taken into account to control these behaviours.