Most organisations we speak to aren’t aware of this and are unsure how to tackle it. Afterall, you can’t discipline another company’s employee!
But the law very clearly puts the onus on employers to tackle discriminatory comments wherever they come from, even if it is outside their organisation and if they don’t do so the employee can sue their employer, rather than the perpetrator, for discrimination even though a different company is the guilty party.
Where an over the top comment is made it is initially sufficient to contact the offending organisation, report what happened, and ask them to tackle it and make sure it doesn’t happen again. But what if it does?
Depending on the circumstances the organisation would then probably need to request a different person deal with your account, but ultimately if you can’t protect your staff from abuse you may need to take a commercial decision as to whether to accept the risk and continue or find a different supplier or customer.
Generally, there needs to be more than one instance of this happening before your employee has a realistic claim against you for not protecting them. They also normally need to inform management it has happened so you have a chance to act.
The responsibility to protect your teams from bullying, discrimination and harassment from whatever source is high, and growing. The best way to do this is to train your managers and staff in spotting and tackling such behaviour.
A great, cost-effective way of doing this is through our 40-minute ‘banter and behaviour in the workplace’ e-learning course that educates your team on where the ‘bar’ is regarding behaviour at work, and how to tackle someone who goes too far.
See below for further details, including a 2-minute demo of the course that discusses the learning points from a swimming pool legal case where lifeguards made lewd comments about a female customer.
Banter & Behaviour in the Workplace
This new e-learning course describes the various forms of harassment and discrimination in an easy-to-understand format so organisations can appreciate where the bar is at work between acceptable behaviour and that which is likely to lead to a grievance or successful Tribunal claim.
Please contact us if you would like to discuss the course, HR, discrimination or harassment in more detail. We would love to hear from you.