Sexual harassment training laws include all forms of electronic devices. Essentially, anything that’s considered harassment in face-to-face communications is considered harassment when electronic devices are used to deliver the communication, including words or images that are unwanted, repeated, abusive, obscene or otherwise unwelcome.
The impact of offensive behavior is compounded by the ease of sharing the offending messages with others. Once you press send, you have no way to control how many people will end up seeing them. Think of all the news reports you see and the negative effects on people’s lives when seemingly private information is shared with the world.
When you’re in the workplace or engaging in work-related activities, remember that all of your messaging is considered to be business communications, and therefore not private.
They were such good friends at work, it was a true shame for them as well as the company. They were a high performing team – they worked really well together. They’d work all hours to solve a problem and enjoyed what they did. So when you enjoy what you do, it’s all about strengths and performing well – they were really a high performing team. But this one relationship within the three went south. There were a lot of text messages going back and forth through the night, and I only found out about it later when one of the employees, Seth, complained about these text messages he was getting from Simon.
Well Simon and Emma were the ones who had this intimate relationship, but Seth is receiving these texts – probably to try to help resolve that problem – and he didn’t want to get involved, he didn’t want to get those texts, he could not get the texts to stop. So once the text is sent you can’t get it back, so there sits in his phone this evidence that this is really inappropriate.
He’s the one that complained, and when he came to my office and wanted to show me these text messages, you know, I was surprised at the language that was used. These were people that really cared about each other at one time. But Seth wanted it to stop, Seth was annoyed, I don’t want to get these any more, I can’t get him to stop, and he won’t leave me alone, and we all work together. Seth was ready to quit.
I actually had to tell him kind of what the basis of his coming to me meant, and yes, he did file a formal complaint. Actually, he would have preferred to not file a complaint and quit. And that wasn’t the right thing for himself or the company. He deserved to work in an environment that was harassment free, he deserved to come to work, enjoy his job, and you know, feel good about what he’s doing. He didn’t deserve to have this kind of treatment, and it ended up being 24/7 – the nature of texting. So he came to me, he did complain.
He was ready to quit. I had to kind of talk him down and help him understand why his problem was really a bigger problem than just his.
When the advent of instant messaging came around, we had situations where in one group people were saying things on instant messaging that was inappropriate and it had gone on for a long time and it got to the point where a couple of people decided that they wanted to stop but because they had been involved in doing it in the past they were unsure about how to get the whole group to stop with the inappropriateness on the instant messaging tool.
The whole group was brought together and were told that all of them had been involved in doing some things that were inappropriate and that people outside the group had noticed it.
We made sure in this instance that we didn’t call out anyone in particular because all of them had been involved in doing this and so what we did is we told them that it had been brought to HR’s attention that the whole group had been involved in sharing these inappropriate exchanges and so we required that they stop.
Consider Accelerate’s online HFC (Harassment Free Culture) training for your organization.
HFC is the best harassment training you can buy because it:
- Has engaging and relatable videos viewable anytime, anywhere; do some in the office, some in the airport or on the plane (LMS permitting);
- Exceeds legal requirements of all fifty US states; and,
- Is provided at a great price.
For more information, email Mike@Accelerate-LD.com.
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