Negating Harassment with an Open Door Policy

Negating Harassment with an Open Door Policy Of the many over-arching concerns a business of any sort must attend to, one of the main concerns is that of claims of harassment by employees against other employees or managers. Claims of harassment must be handled with the most urgent and utmost concern, not only to rectify a situation where in an employee has been potentially harmed, but also because of the impending legal issues that could arise from claims of harassment within the workplace.

Harassment, whether sexual, emotional, or physical, can quickly tear down a company’s morale and overall happiness of the workforce within the company in addition to the needless damage it can inflict upon the victim of the harassment. To avoid cases of harassment within the work place, managers and owners of companies will need to take measures to ensure that they can mitigate the plausibility of harassment occurring within their organization.

Mitigation There are several ways in which to perform this mitigation of possible harassment claims and actual incidents of harassment taking place in the office or within the business. One of the first ways is to properly instruct and inform the employees of a company on what constitutes harassment by implementing sexual harassment training or other forms of harassment training.

Often times, a claim of sexual harassment can be justifiably made by an employee against another employee due to the fact that the offending employee was unaware of the guidelines that have been laid out concerning sexual harassment. Sexual harassment training can help to avoid these types of situations and make clear the company’s standards conditions regarding what constitutes sexual harassment in the office or work place.

Beyond instituting a form of sexual harassment training or other, more general, harassment training course for the employees, a company can do more to protect themselves from claims of harassment by instituting a very important office rule called the open door policy. Unfortunately, it is common for employees who are looking for an advantage over their employer to file false suits of harassment simply because they can get away with it.

Protecting against false claims While it is wrong to dismiss any claim of harassment as fraudulent before taking all the investigative steps, it has happened before that employees file false claims to be awarded money or some other form

of compensation following a lawsuit. To protect against false accusations and increased liability, as well as to protect against the possible cases of harassment from possibly being feasible to accomplish, owners and managers should consider instituting the open door policy within their organization.

The open door policy is exactly what it states itself to be—all doors in the office should remain open as much as possible with the obvious exception to restrooms or designated mother’s rooms or similar areas. Doors to managers offices, conference rooms, or other offices in the building should remain open at all times so that transparency and openness can be visible to all, therefore mitigating and all but eliminating the possibility of harassment taking place behind closed doors.

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