HR DEPARTMENT
PLANNING FOR SUCCESS
PROJECT MANAGEMENT TRAINING & CONSULTING
Mission
Training
Consulting
Project management training and consulting services to assist
organizations in achieving superior business results.
Public and on-site training for all courses, with customized
training available.
Organizational Project Management (OPM) Consulting, gaining a
competitive advantage through Portfolio, Program and
Project management process improvement.
Consulting Limited E X P
Experts in Project Management
www.expconsult.com email: info@expconsult.com phone (844) 668-5411
safe workplace; this is just one more area
the industry needs to focus on.
As an organization that conducts ha-rassment
investigations, we highly
recommend a detailed and complete ha-rassment
policy. If you don’t have a pol-icy,
Saskatchewan Ministry of Labour
Relations and Workplace Safety has good
resources: Harassment Prevention Guide
and Harassment Sample Policy. These are
great resources but consider adding more
detail. Make sure you make it workplace-specific,
as harassment policy is not a
one-size-fits-all item.
Management and leadership set the
tone for your organization. The strongest
commitment an organization can make to
a safe workplace is leadership modeling
the desired behaviours. If the leadership is
not modeling the desired behaviours, start
there. Get them on board. Make sure they
are not harassing others – just because
harassment is tolerated in the workplace
doesn’t make it right. The organization’s
leadership must be held to a higher stan-dard.
If they don’t know better, they need
to educate themselves. Harassment in
the workplace can increase turnover, re-duce
the quality of applicants and have
a potential financial liability. In the case
of Piresferreira v. Ayotte, the worker was
awarded $55,000 (Gorsky, 2015).
Stopping harassment is about address-ing
the elephant in the room. We have all
seen harassment in the workplace, but
what have we done? If they can, the em-ployee
being harassed needs to speak up
and tell their harasser to stop. The man-ager
turning a blind eye to the situa-tion
needs to do their job and intervene.
Often, people are not intentionally harass-ing
others and once they know, they stop.
Stopping harassment is about clear com-munication
and often takes you back to
training and education. If harassment is
not stopped, your policy can guide you in
what to do – you must act.
Acting is about implementing your
policy when there is an allegation of ha-rassment.
Don’t be one of those four out
of five employers that didn’t respond
appropriately when a complaint was
brought forward. This doesn’t mean you
need to launch a full-blown third party
investigation. In fact, the first step in your
policy might be an informal process to ex-plore
the situation. However, there will be
times when the informal process is not ap-propriate
or sufficient. Then you need to
consider the pros and cons of an internal
or external formal investigation, assum-ing
your policy gives you both options.
How do you start the conversation?
Talk about preventing, stopping and act-ing.
Talk about your policy. And if you
don’t have one, write one – now. You can
The manager turning a blind
eye to the situation needs to
do their job and intervene.
saskheavy.ca | Quarter 1 2017 | Think BIG 47
/www.expconsult.com
/saskheavy.ca
link