Many of our employees are not confronting coworkers whose actions make them uncomfortable. How can we help them to take this all-important step in preventing harassment?
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Here’s what you had to say:
- The first thing is training. We make sure that all of our people know about all the avenues they have for making complaints. Since everyone knows that those other avenues exist, they are more comfortable confronting a co-worker first. Both they and the co-worker know what the next step will be. — P.A..
- What we have found helpful is to give our employees a standard phrase to use if someone is making them uncomfortable. One that we use is “Red Light.” If an employee feels uncomfortable, they just say “Red Light.” It’s a little light-hearted, but everyone in the company knows what it means, and that there are consequences for ignoring it. Employees seem to be comfortable using it. — T.C.
- We think that the most important thing is to get the complaint heard. So while we’d rather have employees confront the person who is annoying or harassing them first, it’s more important that someone hear the complaint. We’ve found that if we insist that employees make a direct confrontation first, many will opt to do nothing, and they won’t take advantage of our other complaint avenues either, since they think we’re going to say, “Why didn’t you confront the person?” So we encourage people to come to HR or call our hotline rather than sit and stew. — M.R.