Business savvy employers figure out how to create workplace diversity and put best practices in place to avoid discrimination claims.
Ironically, the type of discrimination that showed the highest percentage of claims was retaliation, according to thebalance.com in a 2016 article. This is ironic because businesses should be busy handling discrimination claims not exacerbating them through retaliation. Fortunately, we can provide you with some guidelines that help you deal effectively with complaints and protect your business.
Anti-Discrimination Steps to Take
As an employer, you should establish policy, provide training and document your actions.
Policy
- Retaliation. Discrimination. Harassment. These are the three types of workplace behaviors you want to discourage and make unacceptable. You can do this by:
- Ensuring employees understand the nature of discrimination, harassment and especially retaliation. (Make it clear that retaliation is a form of discrimination.)
- Encouraging employees to report incidents of discrimination, harassment or retaliation.
- Offering more than one method to report the incident (if the supervisor is the offender do not make the employee report the incident to the supervisor and risk direct retaliation. Offer an alternative method.).
- Explaining all the steps taken to handle complaints.
- Stating the disciplinary action you will take against offenders.
- Providing an appeals process for employees who report a complaint and are dissatisfied with the handling of their complaint.
Training
When employees are not aware of the policies or trained in how to apply them, you can still have problems. Train your employees so they understand how to put the policies into practice. The training should be mandatory. Train them to respond to complaints immediately and handle them in a professional manner. Do the same with appeals. Training helps you enforce the implementation of your policies.
Documenting
Keep detailed records of complaints, actions taken to handle them, appeals and actions taken to handle appeals. Also document all training and preventative measures you have in place to prevent discrimination.
Stephen Hans & Associates is an employment litigation firm that assists small and medium sized businesses with putting policy and training in place to prevent discrimination and other employment related disputes.