7 Types of Workplace Harassment + [Prevention Guide]
By busayo.longe
| Last updated:
Mar 10
|
17 min read
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Harassment can occur in many different social settings such as the workplace, the home, school, churches. The Harassers or victims may be of any gender, race, etc. Workplace harassment is something that does happen. Be it in person or online and it is an issue impacting a number of businesses, both big and small.
Preventing Workplace harassment is the best tool for any company looking to keep up its goodwill. For victims of workplace harassment, the reality is that to win a harassment lawsuit, you’ll have to prove it in court.
Matters of workplace harassment have gained traction among practitioners and researchers. It is becoming one of the most sensitive areas of effective workplace management. This is because a significant source of work stress is associated with aggressive behaviors in the workplace.
Workplace harassment is the belittling or threatening behavior directed at an individual worker or a group of workers. Many people use the term “harassment” to describe any workplace treatment that seems unfair or unduly harsh. Legally speaking, harassment encompasses anything that borders on discrimination.
Embed this workplace harassment form template on your organization’s handbook or website to allow employees and customers to report sexual, bullying and disrespectful incident in your workplace. This employee harassment form template is great for HRs, employers and company managers.
From a legal perspective, harassment has a very specific meaning. It is conduct that is based on the victim’s protected characteristics. If one’s behavior towards another in the workplace is:
Then it is seen as Workplace harassment. In other words, harassment is illegal, especially if it’s based on the victim’s race, gender, age, disability, or the victims’ other protected characteristics. Harassment in the workplace may include unwelcome actions of individuals, the use of objects to threaten, poor means of communication, bad behavior, and jokes in poor taste.
As earlier stated, harassment can come in various forms. It could range from blatant racism to making snide comments and remarks about a colleague. Here discussed are a number of types of harassment an individual can experience at the workplace.
Sexual harassment by definition refers to all actions that constitute sexual abuse or sexual assault. It is pertinent that individuals are aware that such things as indecent dressing and being handy constitute sexual harassment.
The burden of preventing sexual harassment rests on the employer. Some ways to prevent it include:
This is basically any form of harassment by means of email, text messages, and/or the internet. It is also synonymous with cyberbullying which is basically online bullying. It also includes sending, posting, or sharing negative, harmful, false, or mean content about someone else.
Unfortunately, the laws against Cyber harassment aren’t as airtight as that of sexual harassment. But there are definitely a few things you could do to manage the situation. It’s also to be taken seriously because of the fact that victims of cyber harassment may also experience anxiety, fear, depression, and low self-esteem.
Getting harassed during work hours can be a nightmare. Figures show that anywhere between 25 and 60 percent of women have been sexually harassed in the workplace, and 90 percent of the time their harassers were men. So what do you do to prevent and/or stop being harassed during work hours? Write an anti-harassment policy and implement it with stiff sanctions.
Even though blatant racism, which is the discrimination against someone of a different race on the back of the belief that one’s own race is superior, is a lot less common in today’s society, there are still small hints of racism at the workplace, only this time, it has taken on another form.
When a person tells a joke using stereotypes or there is a situation where senior employees of color are supposedly mistaken for junior employees, in a way that belittles them, then we can say that they have experienced racism. This king of implicit discrimination is systemic and is continued by company policies that look utterly neutral on the surface, when in reality, it is exactly what it seems, systematic racism.
The organization owes it to itself to tackle this form of racism or risk losing its reputation. Employees should be educated and stiff sanctions imposed on offenders. They also need to be prepared to take serious action against employees, including management, who display and enact racist behavior.
Gender discrimination also goes by the alias as sexual discrimination. It is any action that specifically denies opportunities, privileges, or rewards to a person (or a group of persons) because of their gender.
Once you let a person’s gender become a factor when deciding who receives a job or promotion, it is gender discrimination. Policies on maternity leave that don’t let women take adequate leave of absence to before and after the birth of the child is a form of gender discrimination.
Under the federal law Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, gender discrimination in the workplace is illegal. Companies can handle gender discrimination in the workplace by:
Typically, stalking behaviors are interrelated with harassment and intimidation and usually include following the victim in person or monitoring them. How do you know you’re being stalked? You are being stalked when a person repeatedly watches, follows or harasses you, making you feel afraid or unsafe.
Workplace stalking is a scary form of harassment. Stalking in the workplace can have grim consequences for the victim and their colleagues. Although fortunately rare, this can even result in serious or fatal. Here’s how to deal with stalking at the workplace (Victim):
Any act or threat of physical violence, harassment, intimidation, or other threatening disruptive behavior that occurs at the work site is termed workplace violence.
Workplace violence ranges from threats and verbal abuse to physical assaults and even in the extreme, homicide. It can affect and involve employees, clients, customers, and visitors.
Workplace bullying is explained as a persistent pattern of mistreatment from others in the workplace that can cause both emotional and physical harm. Some suggest that workplace bullying is generic harassment along with other forms of non-specific harassment.
To combat bullying in the workplace, the company needs to develop policies to prevent it. In developing a policy to prevent harassment or bullying, the focus needs to be on preventing and responding to behaviors that are offensive or potentially life-threatening to others.
In a job interview, it is not just unprofessional for the interviewer to hit on you, you are also entitled to legal protection from such inappropriate behavior. Getting hit on during a job interview can happen, because not all interviewers have the same ethical standards.
You could suffer job interview harassment through being subject to inappropriate questions, inappropriate behavior and an outright implication that your status as a job applicant will be influenced by whether you comply with a request for intimacy.
For a job applicant, it is advisable that you do not give in to any advances against your better judgment. There is nothing worse than securing a job through complying with a request for intimacy. It may/may not be the beginning of a nightmare situation. If you want to take it up, you will need proof that you were indeed harassed.
If upon your rejection of their advances, you’re not hired, it is important to note that employers in the United States do not have to give a reason for not hiring you. Many employers choose to send a standard rejection letter without explaining why you did not receive the job. Because if they do, then they’re at the mercy of your lawsuit. However, even sending a rejection letter is not a legal requirement.
When your boss asked you to do a criminal act or something against the law, you are under no obligation to carry out their bidding. Your best bet in such a situation is to decline and report the issue to the appropriate quarters.
In the event that your employer fires you for refusing to do something illegal and/or for reporting illegal activity, you have a claim to wrongful termination claim. If you are fired because you refused to do something illegal at work or because you reported illegal activity, you may also have legal claims against your employer.
For a clearer insight into harassment, we take a look at a few key statistics that define just how much it has pervaded the workplace. A report by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that 75 percent of workplace harassment victims experienced retaliation when they spoke up.
Forty-five percent of the EEOC’s harassment claims was sex-based. At least 25 percent of women experience sexual harassment in the workplace. Somewhere between 87 and 94 percent of employees experiencing harassment do not file a formal complaint. Sexual harassment costs companies millions.
Can we call tasks not included in your job description workplace harassment?
For example, if the boss asks you to be his chauffeur or private valet, or better yet babysit his kids, are you to oblige him? The answer is no, but not an outright refusal. You’re not obligated to do any of those things except if they are explicitly stated in your offer letter as part of your job description.
So how do you professionally draw the line when it comes to ridiculous requests? Respectfully decline and ask for flexibility. State that while you’ve found these tasks challenging, you’d like to challenge your skills in another specific direction. You should not necessarily do anything your boss asks you to. You’re an employee, not a slave.
Are mental or emotional manipulation at the workplace a form of harassment?
To reiterate, if one’s behavior towards another in the workplace is offensive, unwelcome, and severe or pervasive enough to affect the terms and conditions of the victim’s employment, then we can call it Workplace harassment.
If you are emotionally and mentally manipulated because your employer has explicitly informed you that you no longer have job security, then you are definitely suffering workplace harassment. Always remember that losing your job is not the end of your existence. That being said, it is advisable to seek professional help.
As an employer of labor or HR personnel, it is good to reassure employees at different points that nobody is above discipline in your organization.
Having a company handbook with a specific section spelling out the consequences of workplace harassment is a step in the right direction. It is also important to ensure employees read through the handbook and imbibe the company culture and values.
Read Also: 23 Ethical & Unethical Behavior Examples in the Workplace
Carrying out anonymous workplace harassment surveys for workers, if possible,have an accessible online harassment form for employees. You can have this form as a QR code that can be on employee handbooks, stickers, banners, billboards, and other key places in the office.
Company policy should be reviewed to emphasize zero tolerance for violence at the workplace. No form of violence should be tolerated whether by top-level managers or junior employees.
Most companies insist that employees don’t go into relationships with each other in a bid to shelve the possibility of employees engaging in intimate moments at the workplace. It is important that the company takes a stance on employee relationships and spells out the repercussions of doing so if caught.
One way to identify and nullify harassment at the workplace is by encouraging employees to speak up about their experiences. One way to achieve this is to administer online forms and surveys to collect this information.
Employers of labor and Human Resource personnel can help people speak up by using Formplus forms. With Formplus, you can create forms and surveys that collect data from your employees on workplace harassment online and offline.
The Formplus online complaint form template can be used to receive a customer complaint or employees’ feedback about your business and/or services. You can customize the ready-made form to suit your brand and embed the link on your website, social media pages or simply let customers scan QR code to give you the needed feedback.
Add this complaint form template to your organization and modify it to get feedback on sexual harassment claims. You can use this complaint form in any type of business. The complaint form template is a tool to facilitate feedback being heard clearly and effectively managed by recording key information at the time
Most people don’t stick to just one job their whole lives, at some point, they leave. Employee exit surveys are useful in getting feedback about your company culture. This form should be completed by the supervisor and employee.
This simple online form provides employees with the chance to answer in-depth questions confidentially so that you can know employees’ thoughts and emotions about their jobs and supervisors.
Get feedback on your business processes when you modify this online feedback form template. With it, you can gather useful information on your products, services, and more.
Understand better what your customers think about you with beautiful, mobile-ready feedback forms. Gather feedback on the spot with and gauge client satisfaction to enable you to know areas to improve in your services.
Take proper documentation of incidents in your companies or with your employees with the incident report form template. This form template lets you report cases of unfortunate happenings with hopes of mitigating such future occurrence with proper documentation.
Ideally, an incident report form is one you hope you never have to use, but that’s wishful thinking. It records details of an accident, injury, workplace incident, security breach, or any other type of harm that may have occurred.
This harassment form is the perfect form for every human resources personnel and employers to have on companies handbook or website to get direct information about any type of workplace harassment.
There are a number of International laws guiding against Workplace Harassment and this article is littered with references to that effect. Note that Harassment can occur in a variety of circumstances, including, but not limited to, the following:
This according to information sourced from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
It is very important that as a prospective employee, you check the company’s confidentiality agreement clause before signing a job contract. Is there anything that says you must NOT disclose anything that happens in the company’s, even if it’s illegal?
Ideally, there is always a contract between an employee and an employer. Even though you may not have it in writing, the contract will still exist. The onus is on your employer to give you a written statement within two months of you starting work. Contained in the statement are certain terms and conditions.
An employment contract can be verbal, written or both to be valid. If you continue to work two months after starting work without receiving a written statement containing the terms and agreements of your service, then you have yourself to blame if things go south.
In the event, you do have a contract in place and you’re unlawfully dismissed implying that your employer has breached the terms of your contract, you have a valid case.
If you are subject to harassment at the workplace by the employer you are supposed to bring your harassment complaints to, then it’s a tricky situation. Remember that harassment is both a criminal offense and a civil action under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997.
It is key to have solid evidence because it’s your word against that of the boss. The steps to take therefore if you’re being harassed by your boss would be to:
If you’ve been the victim of harassment you can take action in the civil courts against the person harassing you. In the UK, there is a need for you to make your claim within six years of when the harassment happened.
Also, you can still take civil court action even if the person harassing you hasn’t been found guilty of a criminal offense. Handling harassment is also. No two cases are treated to the exact same degree or approach.
Embed this workplace harassment form template on your organization’s handbook or website to allow employees and customers to report sexual, bullying and disrespectful incident in your workplace. This employee harassment form template is great for HRs, employers and company managers.
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