Employers

Our "best practices" focus on fairness and respect rather than rigid rules. Effective prevention and intervention requires a comprehensive approach that begins with unequivocal commitment from the top. In other words, employers must "talk the talk" and "walk and the walk." Remember, employee mistrust and disengagement is proportional to the gap between what is stated and what is practiced. Here are some tips to help close that gap.

• Policies should distinguish between a zero tolerance stance and a zero tolerance rule and include all forms of harassment that have a negative impact on individuals, work groups and achieving the organizational mission/business objectives.
• Policies should be closely associated to the specific behavior to be avoided, the type of culture the organization seeks to create and the organization's mission, purposes and or core values.
• Policies need to be clearly articulated and should describe the range and reach of the policy, as well as the factors that change how behaviors are evaluated.
• Most importantly, policies must include protection from reprisal.

• Problem-solving and complaint channels should provide multiple options, both informal and formal, for employees to handle situations of perceived harassment.
• A clear roadmap of all channels, how to access them and how they function should be easily obtainable by employees through multiple media.
• Problem-solving and complaint channels should discuss the range of possible outcomes under each option, recognize power differences and seek to create a level playing field, include specific guidelines, rights and responsibilities to a complaint and provide practical tips on what to do if one feels harassed.

• Training should be customized for each of the following constituents: managers, complaint handlers (formal and informal) and employees. Customization should be based in part on employee perceptions and experiences of unwelcome, inappropriate conduct.
• Training content should be a balance between top-down and bottom-up approaches, i.e., imparting organizational messages, policies, procedures and answering concerns raised by employees in surveys or focus groups.
• Focus on a range of behaviors from subtle to blatant, with emphasis on any particularly problematic behaviors as gleaned from surveys, focus groups and/or recent crisis. Periodic refreshers with new issues and organizational data should be offered.

• Monitoring mechanisms should include formal, systematic methods and informal, ongoing methods.
• Formal and systematic methods should include anonymous surveys and exit interviews.
• Informal and ongoing mechanism should include feedback from those utilizing complaint channels, feedback from training, newsletters, suggestion systems and or blogs.

• With every action and inaction, i.e., ask "what message do I/we want to send?"
• Establish meaningful values.
• Ensure that they are consistently evident in policies, practices, business decisions. Everyone's job description should include adherence to values; managers' compensation should be tied to living them.
• Interview, hire, promote & fire with values in mind