Workplace Harassment Solutions
Creating a harassment-free workplace is good business, one that facilitates professional relationships among employees and management, and contributes to a healthy environment. In addition, eliminating harassment allows a company to mitigate risk, protect its people, and eliminate or reduce costly legal fees. What’s more, it helps diminish absenteeism and employee turnover. We understand the challenges of harassment in the workplace and have worked to provide a set of workplace harassment solutions.
Workplace Harassment Solutions: Investigations & Training
At Buckingham Inc., we’re committed to helping our clients develop and maintain a respectful workplace. In particular, we help identify and address inappropriate behaviour. Unfortunately, it happens, and when it does, it can erode morale and foster a negative work environment that affects employee well-being and company effectiveness. Furthermore, a failure to instill respectful workplace principles or respond quickly to inappropriate behaviour can lead to situations of perceived or real harassment, which is a serious workplace violation. Buckingham Inc. is helping companies across Canada reduce that risk.
The Buckingham procedure rejects the myopic approach of simply identifying those in violation of policy. The process, which uses procedural fairness as its foundation, seeks to identify and collect all available information and compile it in a professional and unbiased report for company management to evaluate. The Buckingham investigation process is focused on the restorative rather than punitive, unless, of course, an employee is in breach of the company’s harassment policy or code of conduct policy. Our goal is to help your company create a culture of respect and a harassment-free workplace.
Six Reasons to Prioritize a Safe Workplace in 2021
- All companies are now required to have a harassment policy and procedure in place — at both the federal and provincial level, harassment is now included in the Labour Code (Bill C-65).
- Harassment is now considered a workplace hazard and, subsequently, a workplace injury.
- Companies are legally required to investigate, obtain facts and make informed decisions.
- Procedural fairness.
- Reducing incidents of harassment will facilitate an improved and positive workplace culture.
- A harassment-free workplace will reduce costly litigation and grievances.
How to Reduce Incidents of Harassment in the Workplace
- Create harassment policies and procedures, including an internal complaint process.
- Require harassment-awareness training for all employees.
- Promote diversity and inclusion.
- Provide ongoing, interactive and specialized training for those individuals who are responsible for receiving and resolving harassment complaints.
- Ensure that any complaint or suspicion of harassment is taken seriously and stopped.
- Offer informal resolution to the affected parties, utilizing a trained mediator.
- Communicate your company’s plan regarding these issues to ensure that every employee understands the company’s position.
Conducting Business in Canada, be sure to keep up on the new workplace harassment policies in the new Bill C-65.
