Often in a sexual harassment training class people ask, “Does it only involve gender or sex?” And the answer is no.
If you go back to where the law began, it is actually the conduct that’s directed at a person because of their inclusion in a protected group or class. So yes, it can be behavior directed at someone because of their national origin. And there was a case in California, it was a sixty-one million dollar jury verdict against both the company and the individual, so the individual had to pay I think was a million dollars.
And what happened there, the facts are quite simple. There were these two gentlemen who were working at FedEx just trying to earn money for their family and earn a living. And the boss, (these two guys were from Lebanon so they were Lebanese), and the boss, (I don’t really remember what his background was), but he would call them terrorists and camel jockeys. And those were the two words that came through to the jury. And ultimately the jury concluded that because the boss called them camel jockeys and terrorists, that that was harassment.
And of course it wasn’t sexual harassment – it was national origin harassment. And so the jury awarded them collectively sixty-one million dollars, and again one million dollars of that was directly to be paid by the individual who used the terms terrorist and camel jockey. So it’s an example where your own behavior can come and really get at you.
So we all have our own lens. So when we’re dealing with people, more than one person, different people’s perspectives, we all see it through a different lens.
We see it from how we grew up, our cultural bias, our upbringing. Our experiences are a bias, so that creates a lens on how we view different behaviors and different situations.
As a manager, you set the standard for a harassment free culture by treating others based on their individual merits without regard to race, religion, gender or any of the other personal and protected traits, refrain from stereotyping, innuendo, or using disparaging language based on people’s traits or background, and don’t engage in joking based on the attributes of any type of protected characteristic.
You build and maintain a harassment free culture by making it clear that you don’t engage in, condone or allow discriminatory or offensive behavior.
HFC (Harassment Free Culture) training 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.
Photo compliments of Pexels.com
