This is a 2 minute sample of an online sexual harassment training that is provided in Accelerate’s HFC (Harassment Free Culture).

Mark Howitson, Deputy Counsel General: Often, managers think that if I just ignore the problem, if I pretended I didn’t see that, it’ll go away. But, let me give you an example of what happens if you do that. Typically the decision to ignore a problem comes out in a deposition. And the way works is something like this. So imagine that you’d seen something that maybe you thought was harassment, maybe didn’t, you weren’t sure. But you made the decision for whatever reason to just not mention it or not deal with it.

Brenda Rogers, Human Resources Executive: The worst result that I’ve seen in my career as a result of sexual harassment and I think about it quite often because it was huge. It affected the entire company. The highest producing sales person at a very successful start-up company we had fire.

Narrator: When you are unsure if your conduct or the conduct of your team members is offensive you can check the impact your having by simply asking others if what is being said or done is unwanted or offensive. Not everyone will be forthcoming with you about being offended even if they are.

Short video: Watching the latest celebrity sex tape while you’re at work $100000. Asking for a date, and asking, and asking $350000. Sexting your team back of the office one million dollars. Being harassment free priceless

HFC (Harassment Free Culture) training is the best harassment training you can buy because it:

1. Has engaging and relatable videos viewable anytime, anywhere; do some in the office, some in the airport or on the plane (LMS permitting);
2. Exceeds legal requirements of all fifty US states; and,
3. Is provided at a great price.

For more information, email Mike@Accelerate-LD.com.

The post 2 Minutes of Online Sexual Harassment Training appeared first on Accelerate.

A new law in California requires that all organizations with 5 or more employees must provide mandatory training to all managers and all employees. Managers are required to take a legally certified class lasting 2 hours. All other employees must take a certified class lasting 1 hour.

The new California law is SB 1343. This law requires that all employees complete the required training classes before the end of 2019. If your managers or employees were trained in 2018 or before they must receive the training again in 2019. The laws dealing with the various forms of harassment and sexual harassment training in particular seem to be changing on regular basis. The safest solution as a corporate representative is to ensure that all employees receive training every two years, at least.

In the state of Connecticut all employers with 50 or more employees must provide two hours of training to all supervisors within six months of appointment to that position.

The state of Delaware requires that all employers with 50 or more employees must provide interactive training on sexual harassment prevention by December 31, 2019.

The District of Columbia requires that businesses employing workers who receive tips must train all employees about how to respond to, intervene in, and prevent sexual harassment by co-workers, management, and patrons.

In the state of Maine all employers with 15 or more employees must train all employees.

In Mississippi, the Governor has issued an Executive Order stating that all state employees are required to take an online training course.

In New York State every employer is required to provide employees with training designed to prevent harassment by October 9, 2019 and then continue to offer it annually thereafter. 

As of April 1, 2019 New York City requires companies that have 15 or more employees to provide interactive training annually. The New York law includes both full-time and part-time employees who worked as little as 80 hours and 90 days in a calendar year.

In Nevada, all state employees are required to take a certified harassment class within six months of assuming their position; additionally, they must take a refresher course every 2 years. 

In New Jersey, training is not required for private sector employees. However, in 2002 the New Jersey Supreme Court found that state courts should take into consideration whether or not an employer made training available to supervisors and all employees when deciding whether or not an employer had been negligent in preventing sexual harassment under state law. 

In North Carolina, all state agencies are required to develop a plan for workplace harassment. That plan must include training and other methods to educate all state employees.

In Pennsylvania, online training is required for all state employees.

In Texas, all state agencies must provide discrimination training for all employees that includes sexual harassment by the 30^th day of their employment and supplemental training every two years.

Utah’s Department of Human Resource Management Rules dictate that every state employer must provide sexual harassment training for all state employees.

In Virginia, every legislative branch employee must take online training once every two years.

In the state of Washington, all state employees must take sexual harassment training per Executive Order.

If your organization was not included in the list above you should not assume you are safe. The direction for all legislators in the United States is clear. Most states encourage employers to provide training, at a bare minimum. Many states across the nation are considering new laws requiring some form of interactive training.

The safest and wisest decision you can make for your organization is to provide the appropriate training for all employees at your earliest opportunity. And, regular refresher courses should be offered on a regularly scheduled basis.

In most places across the US the class can be a live, classroom style training. Of course, this can be challenging when you have people who travel often like salespeople. Or, the training can be a more flexible, online class that may be downloaded and completed anytime, anywhere. Some online training classes with certain LMS’ (Learning Management System) allow the class to be downloaded to a laptop, tablet or smartphone and be completed even on an airplane. The completion of the class is then uploaded to the server so the employee can receive a certification that they have completed the course.

So, if you have salespeople who travel for a living, trainers out in the field, or people in remote offices you may find it beneficial to use an online training program.

HFC (Harassment Free Culture) training is the best online training you can provide your company because it:

1. Has engaging and relatable videos viewable anytime, anywhere; do some in the office, some in the airport or on the plane (LMS permitting);
2. Exceeds legal requirements of all fifty US states; and,
3. Is provided at a great price.

For more information, email Mike@Accelerate-LD.com.

Photo compliments of Pexels.com

The post Who is Required to Provide Sexual Harassment Training? appeared first on Accelerate.

Cases where people think that because they had a screensaver on, that that somehow protects the inappropriate stuff they’re doing on the computer. And the classic case was a gentleman who had his desk situated so he faced the door coming into his office, and therefore his computer screen was facing him and you couldn’t see it as you walked by.

Well, he was interested in online pornography and so he would enjoy that during the day, and then when he would take a break he would put on a screensaver – presumably a much more mundane image. In any case, like most screen savers worked, if you at all moved the mouse, the screen would come back up.

And so his admin would come in when he was on a break occasionally and have to move things around on the desk, and would you know, move the mouse and there’s the image of the pornography that she gets to enjoy – or not, in this case. And so she eventually complained saying that she believed it to be inappropriate. Then, I have to go in this guy’s office and I have to deal with all these pornographic images.

And so that’s an example of how, even though this person thought he was being really smart and only sharing with himself this stuff, he actually ended up sharing it with his admin and it didn’t work out.

This is a perfect example of a situation where a well-designed sexual harassment training might have prevented an uncomfortable experience for all.

HFC (Harassment Free Culture) training is the best harassment training you can buy because it:

1. Has engaging and relatable videos viewable anytime, anywhere; do some in the office, some in the airport or on the plane (LMS permitting);
2. Exceeds legal requirements of all fifty US states; and,
3. Is provided at a great price.

For more information, email Mike@Accelerate-LD.com.

Photo compliments of Pexels.com

The post Pornography in Sexual Harassment Training appeared first on Accelerate.

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:

1. Has engaging and relatable videos viewable anytime, anywhere; do some in the office, some in the airport or on the plane (LMS permitting);
2. Exceeds legal requirements of all fifty US states; and,
3. Is provided at a great price.

For more information, email Mike@Accelerate-LD.com.

Photo compliments of Pexels.com

The post Religious Harassment Training appeared first on Accelerate.

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:

1. Has engaging and relatable videos viewable anytime, anywhere; do some in the office, some in the airport or on the plane (LMS permitting);
2. Exceeds legal requirements of all fifty US states; and,
3. Is provided at a great price.

For more information, email Mike@Accelerate-LD.com.

Photo compliments of Pexels.com

The post National Origin and Harassment appeared first on Accelerate.

Protected Classifications include the following:

• Race
• Color
• Religion
• Sex (including: pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions)
• Sexual orientation and identity
• Marital status
• Age (40 and older)
• National origin or ancestry
• Disability: physical or Medical condition
• AIDS/HIV
• Genetic information
• Political activities or affiliations
• Military or veteran status
• Status as a victim of domestic violence, assault or stalking
• Opposition to unlawful harassment
• Association with, or perception that a person is of a protected classification

One of the situations that came up for me that was one of the hardest ones I had to deal with was a case of pregnancy discrimination. We had an employee at the company who had been with the company doing pretty good work for a couple of years.

New manager came on the group – he wanted to expand, get some of his friends in. She was about ready to go out on leave. It was month eight, she was about to take off for leave. And he came to me and said, You know, we’re going to fire this woman. And I said, well explain to me why we would fire this woman, she’s had really good performance assessments. Why would we go down this route? And he said, you know what? After a woman has a child, it just doesn’t work out any more, and they’re not going to be successful in the company, they don’t work as hard, they don’t put in the hours.

The woman went out on leave, she came back three months later, and right away he came forward and he said, “It’s her first month back, I documented all these things that have happened and she’s just not performing at the level of her peers at the same level.”

I said, “Fine, show me the evidence, show me what her peers are doing.” And there was no there … there. There was no merit to what he was saying. You know, she was starting to leave at five, because she had to pick up her child from day care, and he just couldn’t have it. He was convinced that this woman was not pulling her weight. And while I was out one day, he fired the woman.

He didn’t follow any process, any procedure. He simply fired this woman. And she called me that night. She got a hold of my number and she called me, she explained what happened. We ended up firing her manager who had fired her.

HFC (Harassment Free Culture) training is the best harassment training you can buy because it:

1. Has engaging and relatable videos viewable anytime, anywhere; do some in the office, some in the airport or on the plane (LMS permitting);
2. Exceeds legal requirements of all fifty US states; and,
3. Is provided at a great price.

For more information, email Mike@Accelerate-LD.com.

Photo compliments of Pexels.com

The post Protected Classifications Go Beyond Sex appeared first on Accelerate.

But basically the case was as follows: it occurred in a bank, and there was the bank manager and a teller, and the bank manager had sex with this teller, I believe by their own testimony, one-hundred-and-forty-something times. They testified that they had consensual sex something in the order of one-hundred-and- forty times, which in any event, that’s what they testified to.

And then she sued claiming, that notwithstanding the number of sexual encounters that were allegedly consensual, she sued claiming sexual harassment when ultimately she was terminated. And so a number of people looked at that case and thought, well how in the heck can they possibly bring a claim? I mean they had sex like one-hundred-and-forty times, and it seems like there was a consensual relationship.

And when you ask that question to the audience when you do sexual harassment training, you get an interesting divide.

A number of people will say, wait a second, one hundred and forty six times and he’s the branch manager? To what extent was it really consent, and was it forced? And that’s exactly the line the court took. The court said, we don’t really necessarily believe that it was consensual because of the power differences. Because you had a supervisor who had the power to fire her, it’s not clear that she really consented to the sex willingly anyway.

So the court said, we’re willing to permit the claim to go forward even though there was a claim of consent, because it’s not clear that with the power difference, that was really consent.

HFC (Harassment Free Culture) training is the best harassment training you can buy because it:

1. Has engaging and relatable videos viewable anytime, anywhere; do some in the office, some in the airport or on the plane (LMS permitting);
2. Exceeds legal requirements of all fifty US states; and,
3. Is provided at a great price.

For more information, email Mike@Accelerate-LD.com.

Photo compliments of Pexels.com

The post Allegedly Consensual Sex appeared first on Accelerate.

Quid Pro Quo occurs when an employee’s continued employment, promotion or other job related benefits are conditioned upon compliance with sexual advances or demands, or negative job consequences result from the refusal by the employee to comply with the advances or demands.

Only individuals with supervisory or management position over a worker can engage in Quid Pro Quo harassment, since they have the authority to grant or withhold job benefits.

In my very first company in Silicon Valley I came in as a Recruiter, which was pretty much what HR was back in those days in small companies, a company of about six- seven-hundred people. And the person who hired me was right around my age.

A young woman, director of HR, my boss was in her late twenties, I was probably in my early thirties. I had no concept of what sexual harassment was, but I developed a close relationship, a working relationship with my boss. And I would consult with her regularly.

She was a great person to brainstorm with. Eventually she asked, “Why don’t we go out and have dinner after work?” And so I just followed her lead, she was an attractive woman, but in my mind I really didn’t think anything was happening on a romantic level with either of us. And it’s really funny because we had been out a couple of times.

I got promoted, I got a raise, you know – quickly. And I just didn’t put two and two together I just thought I was doing a good job.

The guy I shared a house with and his girlfriend and I went out for dinner one evening. I can still remember it. And after dinner he came and said, you know, “Cheryl really likes you.” And I said, yeah, well we have a good working relationship. He said, she really likes you.

Then one night I went over to my boss’ place for dinner with the whole staff. She was doing a little dinner at her house, and when we were leaving, she said, (everyone else was sort of slowly going out to their cars), and she said, you can stay. I said, oh yeah, you mean like have a glass of wine? And she says, no, no, you can stay the night. And I said, you know Cheryl, I don’t think that’s a good idea.

The next day when I came to work it was like I was working for a totally different person. She had literally morphed into a beast – said I wasn’t doing my job well, I needed extra training – she starting micro-managing me. I mean it was miserable. Projects that she’d been supporting me on, she started to withdraw her support. It was pretty bad. And ultimately what ended up happening was, I began to realize that she was pissed off because I wouldn’t spend the night.

They talk about two different types of sexual harassment. There’s what we’ve been talking about mostly, which is hostile environment sexual harassment, but there’s the other species of Quid Pro Quo sexual harassment. And it’s easy to understand it as a definition, but it’s much more subtle in practice.

As a definition, really all it means is that you offer something in exchange – something inappropriate, some sort of sexual thing presumably – in exchange for some sort of job benefit. So you say, If you have sex with me, I’ll give you a better job. Or the flip side of it would be to say, If you don’t have sex with me, I’ll demote you.

Those cases are rare, and they’re probably rare for two reasons. One is, few people are really dumb enough to do that, but it’s also rare because the evidence of it is never as clear as you’d think. You never have a video recording or an audio recording of somebody saying, “Gosh, if you have sex with me I’ll give you a promotion.” That just doesn’t happen.

So those cases are usually proven by circumstantial evidence, and the way it works is, someone is propositioned and they say no, and the next thing you know they’re demoted, or they’re given a bad performance review, or both, or they’re suddenly fired. And then the court is allowed to use the facts surrounding what we know to show, well this wouldn’t have happened but for a decision to say I’m not going to have sex with that person or I’m not going to agree with their invitation.

So Quid Pro Quo is the subtle occurrence where the jury is allowed to link a change in the workplace to, or a change in someone’s review rating, or a change in their position to an alleged conversation that occurs about wanting to have sex or wanting to have some sort of an affair. But the cases, they just don’t happen that often and I think that’s a good thing.

You know it was    interesting in my second company, I was working as a recruiter and I had been there about six, seven months, and one day a manager came into me and said that she had seen a women crying in the women’s bathroom.

Obviously, because I couldn’t go in the woman’s bathroom I wouldn’t have seen it. And she…Without giving me any details she strongly recommended that I spend some time talking with this woman, it was a young girl from the production line.

She came into my office very hesitant to talk to me, and… but I put her at ease and I asked her what happened, and the story came out that her boss was asking her to have sex to keep her job. He basically told her that if she didn’t do that he was going to fire her, and he had the power to do it. I found out there were other women, and eventually it turned out that there were four women that he had tried this with.

Two had basically told him to go shove it, excuse my language, but the other two were scared – I mean they were outright scared.

So I went to my  boss, and told him the findings, and he said – he was the head of HR – he said, you’ve got to go to the VP of Operations and tell him the story. And I did, and he looked at me and said, well you know the guy was in Vietnam, you know, went through a lot of stress – boys will be boys. In other words, there wasn’t going to be any resolution except a hand slap.

So what I ended up doing, and I don’t know why I had a moral moment, I agonized about it for a couple of weeks and I resigned and left the company.

HFC (Harassment Free Culture) training is the best harassment training you can buy because it:

1. Has engaging and relatable videos viewable anytime, anywhere; do some in the office, some in the airport or on the plane (LMS permitting);
2. Exceeds legal requirements of all fifty US states; and,
3. Is provided at a great price.

For more information, email Mike@Accelerate-LD.com.

Photo compliments of Pexels.com

The post Quid Pro Quo Sex in the Workplace appeared first on Accelerate.

Sam: I used to  be just like that – buff and sweaty.

George: Um, you used to be Gay?

Sam: Oh no, no! Aaah, I am so not Gay.

George: Who else would pose for poster for a Gay Pride Event?

Sam: I guess you’d have to be pretty big homo.

Ralph: Guys, you may be just joking, but I really don’t appreciate you talking down about being gay. Just letting you know.

Sam: Sorry.

George: Right.

When you are  unsure if your conduct or the conduct of your team members is offensive, you can check the impact you are having by simply asking others whether or not what is being said or done is unwanted or offensive.

Not everyone will be forthcoming with you about being offended, even if they are. Be aware of when people attempt to alert you to their discomfort through body language, facial expressions, or changes in group participation.

It doesn’t matter what the intentions are – it’s the other person’s perception that counts.

If your words or behavior have been out of line, apologize and promise that it won’t happen again.

But in any case, for many years there was no law against same sex sexual harassment until a case came out of a drilling rig in the Caribbean. And what happened basically there was, this young man was hired to work on the drilling rig and some of the other men – and there were only men on the rig – some of the other men thought he was effeminate and made jokes about him, and called him homosexual, and did some horrible things like poking him with sticks and just treating him awfully.

He was so upset by it that he ultimately had to quit and he sued claiming sexual harassment. And the case went all the way up to the Supreme Court, and there were two interesting things that came out of that court, that case.

The first thing that came out of that case was the recognition, which is seemingly pretty obvious now, which is that you can have same sex sexual harassment. And in that context, they did exactly what one school had thought, which is that you can, using stereotypes, direct sexually inappropriate conduct at somebody because of how you perceive them to be. That was the first interesting thing that came out of that case.

The other interesting thing that comes out of the case, which also answers some questions people often have, is that one of the judges said that sexual harassment law isn’t there to create a civility code.

We’re really talking about conduct that’s directed at someone because of their inclusion in a protected class. So in theory, under that law, if you’re just boorish and rude to everybody, that’s not sexual harassment; but if you are a particular boorish and rude person toward certain genders or certain ethnicities, than that is illegal.

There was a manager who was great in terms of holding a high standard, he moved fast. Unfortunately he wasn’t very good in giving feedback. There was a scenario where he had an employee who wasn’t performing very well, and he wanted to give feedback and did. The employee immediately showed up at my office saying that he was just yelled at by his manager and he was told that he was going to be fired unless he improved his performance.

And when I asked the employee some questions around, you know, how has his performance been, what communication has he received from his manager up to date? The employee said, I haven’t gotten any communication, this is the first time I’m hearing about it. and I think that the reason why I’m getting this feedback is because I’m white, I’m a male, and I’m over forty. So interestingly, his manager was Asian, under forty, also male. But clearly not everything is protected classes, but still he raised the issue that he felt he was being treated differently.

We had to look into the allegations that he raised and talk to some people on the team, talk to the manager. Obviously something that cost quite a bit of time and was a distraction. And so while this manager wanted to move fast, wanted to improve his team performance, what really ended up happening was that we had to slow down, we had to backtrack and have quite a few conversations and it was quite disruptive to the team.

So the result of the investigation was we found that the employee was basically connecting the dots where there was no real harassment or hostile work environment in existence.

Sexual harassment training can help everyone in company learn to be more respectful of those who are different from themselves.

HFC is the best harassment training you can buy because it:

1. Has engaging and relatable videos viewable anytime, anywhere; do some in the office, some in the airport or on the plane (LMS permitting);
2. Exceeds legal requirements of all fifty US states; and,
3. Is provided at a great price.

For more information, email Mike@Accelerate-LD.com.

Photo compliments of Pexels.com

The post What is Offensive Behavior and What is Not appeared first on Accelerate.

As a manager, you are required to maintain the same code of conduct for yourself and your team during offsite or after-hours events as you would in the workplace. Here are 18 of the Best Code of Conduct examples to consider.

Here’s are examples of inappropriate conversations.

Katie: Hey congratulations on your award. How does it feel?

Joel: Great! I’m going to go dancing tonight.

Katie: Dancing?

Joel: Yeah.

Don: Congratulations, Joel. Your group’s doing some great work. We’re all very excited about what you guys are going to do next year. We’re expecting some big things.

Joel: I’m not going to let you down, Don.

Don: Good.

Theresa: Hey, sexy!

Joel: Whoa! Okay!

Theresa: Congratulations! What? I don’t get a hug from Mr. Fancy Awards Guy?

Theresa: Oh hi, Don!

Don: How’s it going?

Theresa: I’m good! How are you?

Don: I’m good, I’m great!

Theresa: This party is awesome!

Don: Yeah it’s fun, right? I’m glad everyone’s having such a good time.

Theresa: Yeah!

Don: Good. Look, I don’t want to make a big deal out of this but I thought I should bring it up since it is kind of my job and all, right? Look, I want everybody to have a really good time at this party, so it’s important to remember that with your coworkers and office friends, there’s still a protocol that we should follow after hours. And I’m not coming down on you personally, but I just thought I should remind you that this is an office party, and as such, you shouldn’t do anything or say anything that you wouldn’t do or say at the office. Right?

Theresa: You’re so cute when you put your serious hat on.

Don: Great.

I’m glad we had this talk. See you Monday.

Theresa. Yeah! Bye

Katie: Da-yum! They do know this is a work party, right?

Joel: I think they don’t care right now… somebody’s going to be in deep doo doo tomorrow.

Katie: And it could be you if you don’t watch it!

Joel: Aw, come on girl, give me that.

But just as a side note, when you come talking about off-duty work conduct, you know it’s often impossible to separate on-duty and off-duty conduct because something that may happen in a bar often translates into feelings in a workplace.

And so even though the law there now tells us that off-duty work does impact the legal liability issues for the company, it’s also true that this is a practical matter – it’s impossible to draw some sort of invisible line between conduct that occurs off the workplace and then on.

I can remember a situation that happened after hours at one company where a team had gone out for what they call team building, but they really had gone out on St. Patrick’s Day for a little green beer. The green beer ended up not being a little bit, but a lot, and after a while the team stayed for dancing and whatnot. And after that evening, the next day, one of the women came in and said she felt like there was some harassment going on because there was lots of innuendo after a few drinks, and some of the dancing got a little handsy.

Afterwards, when we learned that she felt uncomfortable about things that had gone on, is we put together an investigation and had a conversation with all the people who were there. And as those things usually go, the more we dug, we found some people had left, some people stayed on, and at the end when things got kind of uncomfortable there was a small group of people there. And so we were able to determine, of the people who were there, who were the ones involved. All of them had too much alcohol and were very apologetic about the fact that they had gotten to that point.

The person who was the one who was accused of being a bit handsy was actually admonished, had a letter was put into his file, and so he was warned that if anything ever happened like that again his position could and probably would be terminated with the company.

Engaging, high quality sexual harassment training could easily prevent situations like this.

Consider Accelerate’s online HFC (Harassment Free Culture) training for your organization.

HFC is the best harassment training you can buy because it:

1. Has engaging and relatable videos viewable anytime, anywhere; do some in the office, some in the airport or on the plane (LMS permitting);
2. Exceeds legal requirements of all fifty US states; and,
3. Is provided at a great price.

For more information, email Mike@Accelerate-LD.com.

Photo compliments of Pexels.com

The post Harassment Law Outside the Workplace appeared first on Accelerate.