Human resource management must recognize that harassment of a worker by another employee or a manager can have major costs to a business, as well as the obvious impact on the victim. Even the smallest businesses need to take positive steps to prevent employee harassment occurring.
These steps include having an anti-harassment policy statement, conducting employee training and awareness sessions, having a procedure for investigating and solving complaints, and using it promptly and fairly.
The costs to your business could include:
- the employee bringing a claim of discrimination or harassment against the business, resulting in payment of a large sum of damages
- the employee resigning resulting in you facing the costs of finding a replacement
- other employees resigning as well if harassment at the workplace is widespread – resulting in you having a staff turnover problem
- negative publicity, as a result of a discrimination and harassment case. This will harm the reputation of the business, and may result in a backlash from potential customers and will make it harder to recruit new employees
- Productivity suffering. The victim of harassment will be unable to perform his/her work as well, and time and cost will have to be spent investigating the problems and taking remedial action
Discrimination legislation further states that if management of the business has not taken reasonable steps to prevent harassment from occurring, management can be held vicariously liable if an employee harasses another employee.
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