All high quality, harassment training needs to include the topic of religious harassment. Training that includes religious harassment is more compressive that just sexual harassment training.
When I was an HR business partner I had a manager that came to me to explain that he had two employees sharing a cubicle, a small, a very small area together. One of them had a very strong religious faith conviction and the other had a tendency to use religious related profanity in that person’s presence, that was offensive to that person.
Now profanity is one of those difficult things, because whilst organizations want to encourage a liberal, fair, open and perhaps even an irreverent culture, there is a limit to what’s appropriate to either the values of the individual or what might even be illegal in the context of the law and harassment. In a situation like that, you can’t ignore that because it’s not only offensive potentially to the individual, but it can result in a complaint.
The individual in question that was offended by the use of that profanity, raised it with her manager and her manager came to talk to me about what he should do. And what I explained to him was that, first of all the use of religious related profanity may potentially be illegal harassment – a form of verbal illegal harassment – and therefore it needs to stop. But also, the use of anything that might offend somebody – particularly in close quarters, even whether or not if it falls within a protected category of the law – if it offends somebody’s personal values, it’s toxic to the culture, the team and to the organization, and as a manager you have a responsibility to prevent that.
I launched an internal investigation. I talked to both of the employees involved to try to understand exactly what had happened. So the starting point is to get the facts and try to understand what effect those actions were having, and then to make a determination about what’s the right way to solve that problem. Now in this situation, what we did was talk to the individual that had been using that language, first of all to ask him to cease and desist, and secondly to offer an apology to their coworker. Their coworker was gracious enough to accept that apology and the problem was resolved at the lowest possible level, which is between the two individuals.
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.
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