Name: Understanding Harassment: From Definition to Investigation to Prevention
Uploaded: 2026-10-14T18:16:28.348Z
Duration: 1 h 1 min 15 s
Description: Understanding Harassment: From Definition to Investigation to Prevention

Transcript for "Understanding Harassment: From Definition to Investigation to Prevention": Hello, everyone, and welcome to Understanding Harassment from Definition to Investigation to Prevention. I'm Brian Costello with Meetra Tech Mineral, and I will be your host today. Thank you for joining us. When an employee raises a harassment concern, knowing what to do next matters. Today's session will help you prepare for the mo... That moment and think about the steps your organization can take before a concern arises. We're pleased to have Cara Govero, our principal legal analyst with us to lead the discussion. Before I turn things over to Cara, I shall share a quick overview and a few housekeeping items. So move it to the next slide. And so recognizing harassment takes more than spotting obvious misconduct. A concern may come through a formal complaint, a conversation with a manager, or something someone observes at work. Employers need to know how to assess what they're hearing and when an investigation may be needed. A complaint is a difficult time to discover gaps in your process. That's why preparation matters, including clear policies, reporting channels, employees know how to use, and training that helps managers understand how to respond. Today, Cara will walk us through recognizing potential harassment, conducting fair investigations, and strengthening prevention. As you listen, think about how your team would handle a concern today and where you may wanna make improvements in your process. This session offers practical guidance for people who manage workplace responsibilities, including HR professionals, benefits administrators, and finance teams. We'll focus on those questions that come up when someone raises a concern. How do you recognize potential harassment? What should happen next? And how can your policies and processes help your team respond consistently? The session provides general education and is not legal advice or guidance for a specific jurisdiction. The goal is to give you a clear understanding of the issues and a... And practical takeaways you can bring back to your organization. Who we are? For those who are new to Meetra Tech, we serve more than 28,000 organization across legal governance and risk and compliance as well as HR solutions, for businesses. Our HR solution business helps employers manage responsibilities through the employment life cycle... Life cycles. That includes HR compliance and guidance, employment eligibility, and I nine requirements, background screening, performance and talent management, and our newest solution, leave management. We work directly with employers and through partners, including health insurance carriers, HCM platforms, and benefits brokers to bring these solutions to their clients. Today's webinar is one way we help employers understand workplace challenges and prepare to address them. And just a couple quick housekeeping items before we begin. We will send the recording and slides after the event so you will be able to revisit the material. Please submit your questions through the q and a tab. You'll see it on the right side of the screen. There's chat and q and a. We prefer the questions in the q and a. We also have two poll questions during the presentation, and we'd love your participation. They will be at the end of this session. And I don't know if I mentioned, but we also will have a survey that will launch next to the q and a tab, about thirty five minutes into the presentation. We'd love your feedback. So now without further ado, introduce Cara. Cara is a principal legal analyst at Mineral, part of Meetra Tech. Cara spends her time examining new and amended employment laws and following trends in HR. She translates legal language into plain English and identifies what employers need to understand and how it applies to their workplaces. That perspective is especially valuable for today's topic where employers need to understand how both to recognize a concern and how to respond. And with that, I will turn the per... Presentation over to Cara. Take it away. Alright. Alright. Thanks, Brian. Hey, everybody. Glad to be here with you today. This is, one of my favorite topics. So what we'll be looking at is the definition of harassment as this is something that is often misunderstood. If not by HR professionals, then definitely by employees. So hopefully, this will help you better understand and maybe better explain it when you need to. Then we'll talk about how to respond to an allegation, and then we'll get into proven best practices for prevention. So let's start with the definition of harassment, and you might find that a few things I say in the next ten minutes surprise you. So, harassment is unwelcome conduct that's based on a protected class. I will keep coming back to this based on a protected class. I guarantee I will get some questions, you know, five slides from now saying, is this thing harassment, but it doesn't involve a protected class? So the answer will be no. So unwelcome conduct related to a protected class, that's employment harassment. Right? The kind that we are concerned with as HR professionals. Now just the word harassment, like, out in the wild could mean a lot of different things. Right? Stop harassing me between siblings or something like that. But the kind that we are concerned with that could get us into quite a bit of legal trouble as employers, requires both of these elements. So the federally protected classes, I've got listed there, but I'm sure you're familiar with them. If you're in a state that has additional protected classes, it's possible that your state law prohibiting harassment, covers those as well. So it's always worth knowing, the protected classes in the states where you operate because any unwelcome conducted... Conduct based on those protected classes, could could be harassment. Now, the next bit that I think is is surprising for some people is that harassment is not automatically illegal. It has to rise to a certain level. So it has to be kind of bad, basically, for you as an employer to be in legal trouble for it happening or for you allowing it to go on. So, what are the criteria here? The first, there there are two ways we can get there. The first is that putting up with the the conduct is a condition of continued employment. So you've basically been told, yeah, your boss is gonna do that. You know, put up with it or leave. Those are those are your options. That's number one. Number two is the conduct is severe or pervasive enough that it would be considered by a reasonable employee, to be intimidating, hostile, or abusive. So do we know what a reasonable employee is? No. We do not. We have to make some reasonable best guesses as to what that looks like. If you do have someone who is very, very sensitive, just because they think something was severe or pervasive, doesn't necessarily mean that it was. On the other hand, if you've got someone who will put up with anything, but their coworker doesn't like the harassment they're receiving and and reports it, it it sort of depends on on what the coworker thinks of this. We'll we'll get into that a little bit more in a minute. But the idea is we're looking for something pretty bad, which is severe, or something that is ongoing. So that ongoing harassment is generally where we come into a hostile workplace. Now employees love to throw this around. This is a hostile workplace. They love it, and it can be very distressing for HR professionals, particularly those who are newer in career when an employee comes in and says, this is a hostile workplace. You have to do something about it because we know that that's a legal problem. Right? But in many cases, it's not a hostile workplace because once again, it has to be unwelcome conduct that's based on a protected class. So if you've got a boss out there who's just mean to everybody or swears at everybody, that's not a hostile workplace. It might be a toxic work environment. It might be highly unpleasant. It's probably something you should deal with if you want to, you know, keep morale up and and prevent a lot of people from quitting, you probably need to deal with that toxic manager. But that's not a hostile workplace unless, again, it's based on a protected class. So many, many situations, are really just personality conflicts or someone having a bad attitude. Those should be dealt with just for, you know, the sake of the organization and the bottom line in general, but that's not the kind of thing that we necessarily need to get whipped up about in HR with respect to, an employment law claim that could be filed in court against us. So what does severe or pervasive look like? Now, again, we are gonna come back to the reasonable person standard. This really applies when we're talking about severe. Pervasive is going to be like, was it ongoing or not? Yes or no? That's easier to answer. Severe, you know, that's gonna depend on people's impressions and and general tolerance, for for nonsense or for jokes or for whatever it might be. So as I was mentioning earlier, the person who is the target of the conduct is not the only person who can report it. They're not the only person who can bring a claim. So if you've got someone who's willing to put up with a lot of inappropriate teasing and they really genuinely don't care, but you've got another employee who's like, wow, that's super offensive, and they're not being unreasonable in finding that offensive. They are in fact a reasonable employee. You still need to deal with that. So some examples of severe harassment here. Now, ultimately, this will come down to what a court decides or what a jury decides if you end up in litigation. And these are always fact specific, and it really depends on who's hearing the case. So these are some guesses for me. I think probably good guesses, but guesses nonetheless as to, what would constitute severe or pervasive. So, you know, physical assault, probably gonna be severe most of the time if it is basically, like, straight for the genitals, right, or or some other sensitive body part. Now someone brushing somebody on the shoulder or squeezing the shoulder, you know, that's not gonna jump straight to severe. That will probably be something that's pervasive if they keep doing it. So continually having someone massaging somebody else's shoulders, not severe, but definitely could be pervasive if it's ongoing and you don't put a stop to it. So couple more examples here, you know, like revenge porn. If you've got, somebody circulating... Even if it's generated by AI, you've got somebody circulating a picture of their coworker nude around the office, that is almost certainly going to be severe harassment, and something that's gonna get us into trouble that we need to put a stop to immediately. Pervasive is a little harder. Once again, that's something that is ongoing. We don't have an exact number. Like, how many times does that have to happen? Two times, three times, five times? Not sure. Probably more than twice. An example I like to give here is... Let's say you've got a particularly religious employee named Robert. He keeps a bible at his desk, and he prays over his lunch. This isn't bugging anybody, except there's a coworker of his who thinks it's hilarious to call him Bible Bob. So he started calling him Bible Bob in the hallway or when he runs into him at lunch. Occasionally, he'll do it in a meeting. Now I'm gonna go ahead and say this is probably unwelcome conduct, but that's me and my sensibilities. If Robert didn't like it and reported it, it doesn't seem very severe. Right? It seems like kind of a a mild joke. Like, oh, that's just Joe being Joe. You know? He jokes with everybody. But if Robert finds it to be unwelcome, it's most certainly based on a protected class, which is his religion. So we need to put a stop to that immediately. And, again, even if Robert wasn't offended by this, if someone else was, they could report the behavior, and you would need to take the same steps to investigate it and to stop it. So that's one where our managers not understanding harassment and these definitions can really get us into a lot of trouble because I think, particularly in in certain, workplace cultures, you know, joking around is is very acceptable and accepted and just sort of part of how things go. But that doesn't mean it's going to be legally okay if someone in the workplace does, in fact, have a problem with it. So you might have managers who are like, that's no big deal. We've always had people joke like that. You know? That's that's part of our culture here, so I'm gonna let it go. I'm not gonna punish anyone or talk to anyone or or shut this down. You, the offended employee, need to just get over it. This is a manager simply not understanding, the definition of harassment, the idea of severe or pervasive pervasive harassment becoming illegal and leading to a hostile workplace claim. So training can go a long way here, to make sure that they understand what harassment can look like. Even if in their mind, something is pretty benign, it could be illegal, and they need to understand that. If you don't teach them, they won't know. So I will come back to training being fairly important here. And I guess I kind of already sort of jumped into our next slide there, which is the no big deal trap. So, again, basically, managers saying, that's not a big deal. Just ignore him. You know, let it go. He means well. She means well. You know? That is dangerous for us. And and we need to we need to make sure our managers understand, and we need to stay involved as as the HR professionals in having these conversations and probably making sure that all employees know that they can and maybe should bring complaints directly to HR. We generally wanna give options for where employees can take complaints. If someone in HR was doing the harassing, it might be hard for report to HR. So we wanna have at least a couple of options. But but, certainly, HR should be one of them so they're not forced to report to their manager, who, again, might just blow off bad behavior. So how do you know what's what? How do we know what's severe? How do we know what's pervasive? As I mentioned before, these terms are not well defined, if defined at all, in the law. There's certainly no consistent definition, in in case law for these. So it's going to be what I would call a sniff test most of the time as to whether or not something was severe and then pervasive. How many times has it happened? I'm gonna go ahead and say three times. This is starting to look like a pattern. I would definitely jump on that. I mean, even if somebody did something offensive or bothersome twice, I would talk to them about it, because we don't want them doing it a third time. Right? But, ultimately, whether something is illegal or not doesn't mean we shouldn't go ahead and correct it. You know? Maybe the behavior this time didn't count as severe, but, the employee who who did the thing, having gotten away with it, thinks that they can amp things up a little bit and get away with that as well. We just don't wanna cross any of those thresholds if we don't have to. So dealing with these things as soon as possible, even if they don't seem super bad, is generally the best practice. Alright. Let's move on to responding to allegations. So I see a couple of questions, but they're not... Oh, there we go. Okay. Here... I'll I'll take a question before we go on because I think this was relevant. So when no no formal complaints are being brought, but HR hears that a male employee is giving weird compliments to female employees, does HR need to take action or just keep a close eye until someone states it's unwelcome? I would definitely get into that. Yeah. Yeah. So you have the knowledge even if it was just a rumor, you're just sorta hearing things, however you're hearing them. If if HR knows... If the company knows about some kind of behavior, that's basically where your legal liability starts. There have been lawsuits where employees never complained, or didn't complain till fifteen years later, you know, while they were still working there, and and they ultimately won because, HR should have known or they did know. And we know they knew, but there weren't formal complaints. So, yeah, your your responsibility has really started once you hear that these things are happening, and you would wanna get involved in that whether a formal complaint was made or not. Great question. Alright. If being treated differently by a supervisor when compared to others... Sorry. This is this is a long question, and, I'm struggling to parse it. But, basically, managers treating people differently can ultimately be harassment if it's based on a protected class. So if, for instance, a manager is giving preferential treatment to their female employees, maybe giving giving the women time off, or PTO or, you know, unpaid leave to take care of children, to take care of family, and then a male employee asks for similar treatment because they need to pick pick their kids up from day care. And the boss is like, no. You know? I'm fine with the women doing it. You, I'm gonna say no. That could certainly look like unwelcome conduct based on a protected class. We're basically giving preferential treatment to the women. That would honestly probably be more like a discrimination, just a straight discrimination rather than a harassment claim. But the bottom line is different treatment between employees, if we can identify a protected class in the mix, can be problematic. Okay. Now I'll get started on responding to allegations. I wanted to get those out of the way because I knew that they were, probably on that topic. Okay. So what are our best practices here? Well, first things first, you gotta do it quickly. If you have received a complaint, you can't put it off for a few weeks or till you're less busy. You can't be like, oh, well, our main HR person who usually deals with that is on maternity leave, so we'll get back to it, you know, in a month when she returns. That will not do. Again, the laws don't say how fast you need to do these things, but they do pretty universally say it needs to be done promptly. So I would take that as basically drop everything else and get into this investigation. This should become a top priority for you if you have received a complaint that harassment is taking place or discrimination is taking place or that there is a hostile work environment, which is really just a type of harassment, that is something you want to get on right away. And then we wanna make sure that we're picking someone qualified to get into it. So, one of you made a comment. I couldn't tell if it's a comment or a question, but basically about bringing in a third party. That's great if you can afford it. You know, I think a lot of employers can't afford to have a third party in for any old investigation or for any any complaint. However, certainly, if, for instance, you don't have anyone in HR who's really comfortable with this, or the allegation is fairly complicated, maybe involves multiple people, possibly the person doing the harassing or alleged harassing is the CFO or, you know, some other high ranking employee in the organization. And it's gonna be difficult for, you know, a a mid level HR person to feel effective in investigating. In that case, you know, if you can swing it, it would be great to have a third party involved. And then, also, you know, if if HR is the the party... Whoever's in HR is the party being accused of the harassment and you don't have anyone else who can do the investigation because they simply don't know the law or understand the concepts, you know, then that would be another situation where a third party is is not a bad idea at all. So we want this person to understand the law, whoever it is, whether it's an HR coordinator, it's an HR director, it's some other designated party, who maybe has had previous experience in this. We want them to understand the law. We want them to not have a stake in the outcome. So we want them to be without bias with respect to this incident and these individuals. So if you've got, like, a long standing beef between two employees, they've both been there a decade and they just don't like each other, if one of them was accused of harassment, you wouldn't want the other one investigating it. Right? That would not feel bias free. You know, hopefully, that's not gonna be the situation ever, but that would be an example of where you'd wanna think a little bit outside of the box about who's gonna do the investigation. We might want another member of management involved in the investigation, to sort of take notes and help us assess the evidence that we're hearing, the testimony we're hearing when we're interviewing people. That's really your choice. If... It's not required that you involve other individuals, but for instance, you know, if you just felt like it was gonna be really hard to tell who was telling the truth or not because maybe both parties involved are really reliable, good employees. You're kinda surprised anything happened here at all. You know, you might want another party involved to just help you help you sort these... Those things out. So not required by law, really your call. But, you know, if if you're the person tasked with this job and you think it would be helpful to have someone else do that with you, that's okay. And, you know, they can be your designated note taker and your your thought partner, if you will, in in how to approach this. But, of course, if we select that extra individual, we wanna make sure that they are also without bias, and can be reasonable and impartial. So, obviously, we're gonna conduct some interviews, or hopefully, that's obvious. Now we we would like to not have received an anonymous complaint. Anonymous complaints and anonymous reporting is a popular tool, and I see the value in it because it makes it more likely that someone will come forward. However, it does make investigation much more difficult when you can't ask any follow-up questions because someone has reported anonymously. So an anonymous reporting system, you're going to have further conversations with the individual who, reported the behavior. We're also going to talk to any witnesses if there were any. Often, there aren't. But, you know, something happened in the lunchroom or the hallway or in a meeting. There there may well have been witnesses. And then, of course, we're gonna talk to the accused, and we wanna make sure that we are giving them the opportunity to really tell their side of the the story and exactly what happened. You know, we're gonna do our due diligence here and sort of, like, give them their day in court. You are not obligated to follow the rules of evidence or any other legal nonsense when doing an investigation, but we do want to hear out, the accused party. If they did... If you did, for instance, ultimately terminate them and they felt that you had not heard them out, you know, that would certainly be fodder for some kind of wrongful termination claim, or if a lot of people heard about it, slander, libel, who knows? So we want to be careful there. We want to be fair, basically. We've got in the mineral platform a packet with interview forms. We've got an interview form for the, person who reported the behavior. We've got an interview form for witnesses. We've got an interview form for the accused. And we have, like, a wrap up document that's like, this is what we decided. This is why we decided it. This is what we're doing about it. That goes along with a really nice guide we've written. Like, I was heavily involved in all of that, as were a bunch of lawyers. So, we've got this stuff made for you. If if you do have access to the mineral platform, this stuff is is ready built to help you do this in a fair and impartial way. Like, we've got the questions you should ask. So you can just sort of follow the template and feel like you've done well. These interviews, like everything else, should be done quickly. We don't want to wait a month. People's memories are not that good. They're not even that good right after something happens, so we definitely don't wanna wait weeks and weeks. If there were witnesses, we wanna talk to them ASAP. Once we've done that, we're gonna look at what we've got. What do our notes say? You know, what do we think? What do we feel? Who seemed to be telling the truth? Do we have any other evidence that we can gather? Do we have emails? Do we have text messages? Do we have Slack or Teams messages that support this? Do we have recordings of meetings? I mean, I feel like most meetings are recorded these days. So if someone says their boss is being inappropriate in meetings, you can probably go watch those meetings. So we definitely wanna pull in any evidence that we can. And if there is evidence that you haven't looked at, that could come back to bite you, I feel like. Again, it... This would be like, you know, if you terminate someone as a wrongful termination, they're like, there was evidence you coulda looked at. Those meetings, I clearly was not doing the thing you said I was doing. We wanna make sure we've looked at all the evidence and, again, done our due diligence. We wanna look for for any past behavior. We want to find out if this person is doing this to anyone else. That doesn't mean we're gonna go on a witch hunt. But, for instance, if you were talking to the witnesses to a particular incident that had been reported, you know, you could ask the question, are you aware of any other, incidents similar to this one involving, you know, these individuals? So we really wanna dig down and and find what we can find. We wanna have sort of the maximum amount of documentation and and evidence that that we did what we needed to be done. Oops. Clicked the wrong button. Let's go forward instead. Alright. And so then once we've done that, we are going to make a decision and take action. We will decide if harassment, you know, harassment proper took place or if any other policies were violated. So in a lot of cases, you might decide, you know what? This wasn't illegal harassment based on a protected class, but it's still something that needs to be dealt with. You know? This person is being dismissive towards someone else in meetings. We don't think it's based on a protected class, but it's still obnoxious behavior. So we're gonna have a conversation. We're gonna take the disciplinary action or, you know, maybe disciplinary is too much. Maybe we're gonna coach an employee, about, you know, how we need them to behave going forward in order to prevent them from, you know, upsetting their coworkers. Those are uncomfortable, annoying conversations, but they can really go a long way towards making the workplace better. And in some cases, you're gonna have a policy violation. You know, maybe it's it's a violation of your general conduct guidelines that you're ultimately looking at. They did something that violated that policy but still wasn't harassment. We're gonna deal with it. Right? We've gone all the way through this investigation. We figured out what happened. So now we're going to do what needs to be done to prevent that from happening in the future, whether it was harassment or not. So we're gonna remind everyone involved about our anti retaliation policies. Retaliation is extremely common, and it's included in probably, like, two thirds of EEOC complaints. Like, someone will file that they were discriminated against or harassed and retaliated against, which generally looks like, you know, you tattle on your manager for being inappropriate. Your manager gets investigated. Whether they're ultimately disciplined or not, now they're mad at you, like, for life, and so they're gonna treat you poorly. That's retaliation. So we want to be promising that we're going to prevent that, and then we want to actually do prevent that. We need to we need to, put our money where our mouth is. So we wanna keep an eye on those managers. If it's the manager that was reported, whoever was reported, we wanna make sure that they understand that retaliation, is not going to be tolerated. And then we do wanna let the employee who reported know that we have taken steps. We have done something. We want to close the loop with them. You see so many people online complaining about how they reported to something to HR and they never heard back. So they just feel completely dismissed. They have no idea what's happening. They feel like they're going to be retaliated against, and they just don't know. They don't know what HR did. Maybe HR investigated and didn't follow-up. Maybe HR never investigated. We want the employee who complained to know that we have done something, that we've done our due diligence because this is how we defend ourselves in a lawsuit if we end up in a lawsuit, is by saying, yes. We we did the thing. We did the investigation, and we took steps. And, you know, if we did the investigation and we took the steps and we didn't tell the employee who reported. And so the employee who reported filed a lawsuit, and we ended up in litigation or pre litigation, and we could prove that we investigated and we did something. You win then, right, as the employer. Like, we did the thing. We win. It will still have cost you tens of thousands of dollars to get to that point where you win and many, many hours of stress. So we wanna avoid that. We wanna avoid that in the first place, by letting the complainant know that we have done what needed to be done. Alright. Now I'm going to get into what I call a recipe for prevention. Now this whole section is based on... Let's see if it's on my next slide. An EEOC select task force, very fancy sounding, study. And I think they looked at more than 1,500 employers about a decade ago and basically compared their practices versus the number of harassment complaints they had. And they found a very solid set of behaviors that made it less likely that an employer was going to have to deal with harassment, basically. And, none of these will surprise you if you've been in HR for for more than a few minutes. So what they found was that committed and engaged leadership was one of those, essential elements. Also, consistent and demonstrated accountability, strong and comprehensive harassment policy, as that shouldn't surprise anyone. If you don't have a policy, how can you expect people to follow it? We have all these expectations for employees, and often we don't communicate them. People cannot meet your expectations if they don't know what they are. So really the foundation, is a policy. In fact, I've been saying forever, even if you didn't want to have a handbook, if you're like, employee handbooks are for the birds, that's too much trouble. I don't wanna do it. If you should only have one policy that you hand out separately, you don't have to call it a handbook, it should be your harassment prevention policy or anti harassment or whatever you wanna call it. But that should be the one policy that you have that you make all employees aware of. So that's really key, not surprising. A trusted and accessible complaint procedure. So if you don't have a complaint procedure, you're probably sunk if you end up in litigation. This doesn't have to be super complicated. It's probably a fairly short policy, maybe even just attached to your harassment prevention policy that says, if you experience harassment, please report it to your direct manager or any member of HR. Maybe you add a third... An... A third party there or a member of the board or the CFO, whatever. Again, it doesn't have to be complicated, but it has to be there. And it does need to be accessible. Like, everybody needs to know what it is. They need to know how to do it. We wouldn't want to send someone through 14 online steps when most of our workers don't actually have access to a computer at work. You know, so if if we're not giving them the tools to get there, then then it's not accessible. And then training, pretty straightforward. Like I've been saying, you know, if people don't know your expectations, they can't meet them. If managers have never heard about the concept of pervasive harassment, and that, you know, like a little jokey joke about someone's religion or their sex or whatever, could potentially become a true hostile workplace claim. If they don't know that, they can't they can't do anything about it. They can't act on it appropriately. So training is really key. So we'll just take a slightly deeper look at some of these. So leadership and accountability. What does this mean? Well, part of this is, I would say, leaders stepping in occasionally to say, we care about this and this matters to us. So if you've got a yearly or a biyearly harassment, training course that you've got people taking, you know, having your head of HR or even better, maybe your CEO, saying something about it. You know, some small bit about why it's important or they support it or they think it matters. That shows that leadership is invested in CARES. We also wanna make sure that we're actually allocating resources. That means money and time to ensure that all of these things are getting done, that there's a policy, that there's training, that there's a complaint procedure, that if HR receives a complaint, they can drop everything and do something about it. Or maybe that you can hire a third party if what you really need in that situation is a third party. So there is money involved here, which is, you know, always hard, but it's important that HR, generally HR, has the support they need. And sometimes that means financial support. Sometimes that means hours in the day support, to to manage all of this. So I already talked a bit about the policy, having a policy, and how important that is. There are some key things you want in that policy. I would say harassment policies of old, often on quid pro quo and, like, sexual assault, basically. So grabbing someone's breasts would be the example, or offering someone a promotion in exchange for sex would be another example. And they would sort of leave off all the the other things, that could potentially lead to a harassment complaint that are probably less obvious, but, you know, ultimately just as bad because illegal is illegal. So this would be things like, you know, racial slurs, you know, jokes about religion, sexist jokes, circulating revenge porn, looking at porn in the office, you know, whatever the list might be. We wanna have more than just a couple of things on there. We really want people to understand what harassment looks like. Again, with expectations. If they don't know, they they can't they can't follow it. Right? If they don't know what you expect from them, they can't meet those expectations. So we also wanna be mentioning our our complaint procedure. We want to say that we're gonna do something about it quickly. We want to make sure people know that retaliation will be prohibited. Basically, we just really wanna make people comfortable coming forward, as comfortable as as they can be. Now if you're using our Smart Employee Handbook, we've got you covered there. We've got a very comprehensive harassment policy, of course. So some other sort of best practices on your policy is we want it to be clear and easy to understand. We want it to be in any language that is the primary language of your workforce. So if you've got a lot of native Russian speakers and you're only offering the policy in English, we again have the expectation communication problem. So get that translated. You know, even just using the Internet for translation is is probably gonna be fine. It's gonna get you close enough in most cases. Something is going to be better than nothing there. We want to give this to employees upon hire, of course. Right? And we also want it to be in our employee handbook. We probably want them signing off on the employee handbook every year, and that might be a good time to say, Hey, we've got a few key policies that we really want you to review before you sign off on the handbook again with these recent updates. That includes the policies with recent updates. It also includes the harassment prevention policy, the timekeeping policy, and, you know, whatever other policy might be important to you. That's just one way to sort of keep that fresh in people's minds that you do have this policy and you would like them to read it. Now the last thing on here is that it's periodically reviewed and updated. Don't worry too much about that. If, again, if you've got our handbook, or you're reading our law alerts, if something changes in your state that would affect the harassment policy, we're gonna tell you about it. And if you're using the handbook, we're gonna fix it for you. So you probably don't need to worry too much about that. Even if you weren't using our tools for that, these things don't change very often, so that's nice at least. Unlike, say, sick leave in California that has one or two updates every single year, these policies change less often. You do want to periodically review it and hopefully have a third party like Minerals watching out for that stuff and keeping you updated. But it's not something that should be super labor intensive to keep up with changes to the law because it doesn't change all that much. So we want an effective complaint system. We've already talked about this a lot. We want them to have a couple of ways to report. We wanna make sure that whoever's involved is unbiased and understands the law. Be fully resourced. Again, you know, there's a method for someone to report, and someone will drop what they're doing and take care of that immediately. So talking again about the employee who is receiving these complaints, we want them to understand the law. We want them to be unbiased. We want them to make employees feel comfortable talking about what has happened to them. So you kinda wanna be evaluating people's interpersonal skills and and whether they they do make other people comfortable, whether people historically can open up to them or not. Now I know in a lot of organizations, you're not gonna have that many choices. There's maybe two people in HR. And, you know, so giving people the opportunity to report to either person in HR or their manager or the CFO or the board, whatever, that's all you can do. That's the best you can do. I totally understand that. However, if you have, you know, five people in HR and one of them is very good at making people feel at ease, and getting people to open up and is known for being kind and unbiased and all that jazz, then, you know, that would be your your rock star for the investigations, and and receipt of the complaints. Alright. Finally, training best practices here. Champion senior leaders, like I said early on. That doesn't mean they have to give the training themselves, but even if they say, hey. This is important to us. We're doing our annual training. See you there. You know, that can go a long way. We do want it to happen yearly or every two years. I think I think two years is sort of necessary for people to remember anything. Annual is better, but, you know, if it's not required by state law, I understand that annual can feel like a pain and like a big effort. But, certainly, I think annual is is the way to go if you can pull it off. We do want all employees to get this. Again, we want it to be clear. And then tailored to your workplace and your workforce. Now most people are getting their harassment through a third party, their harassment training through a third party, maybe mineral. And, you know, so that... It's gonna be a preprogrammed thing. It's not gonna be tailored for your workforce. But you can add just a little color there. Right? So maybe in the email that you send out that says you're required to do this training by x date, you also say, and here are some examples of, you know, how this might uniquely apply in our organization. So for instance, like, if you were a restaurant or or a hotel, you know, you might be particularly concerned with how customers are treating your employees, and that absolutely is harassment that you need to deal with. So that might be something that you would give a few choice examples of. Now before we wrap up and get to any additional q and a, I figured we would point out the states and the cities that require training. So there aren't that many, and we haven't seen a lot of these laws passing recently. Like, it's not a big trend to require harassment prevention training, or most of these are sexual harassment prevention training. So I don't anticipate that all of a sudden we're gonna have 30 or 40 states requiring this, but here are the states and cities required now. We've got California, Connecticut, Delaware, DC, although that's pretty narrow. Illinois and Chicago, Maine, New York and New York City. Virginia, also very narrow, and Washington state is very narrow. So, if you are in any of those locations and you were not aware that training was required, now you know, and we can probably help you out with that. Alright. I'm gonna take a look at the q and a and turn it back over to Brian for a few minutes. Alrighty. Thanks, Kara. Great great session so far. And, now we have an opportunity and, battling the PowerPoint. There we go. Poll number one. So if you're listening to this information and you are not a Mineral customer and you're like, gosh. I'd like to explore what the Mineral HR and compliance platform could do for me and my business. Now will be the time to raise your hand. So would a demo of the Mineral HR and compliance platform be helpful for your team? I'm gonna launch a poll on the right side of the screen. It'll appear between the chat and q and a tabs. You can go ahead and answer yes. I'd like to schedule a demo, and we'll have our team, contact you and set up a time to explore the platform. If it's not what you're interested at this point but love the information, well, we're glad you joined us anyway, and you can select b, not at this time. And then for the folks who are already mineral customers that are in the audience, if you're like, yeah, love the platform, like to understand different things a little bit better, or maybe explore options to go from handbook builder, handbook to smart employee handbook plus, or something like that, you can always select numbers or letter c. I'm already a mineral customer who would like to learn more about additional mineral solutions, and we can contact you and and help you out in that capacity. So I'm gonna go ahead and close out that poll, and I thank you for participating. And then, at the top of the presentation, I mentioned that we do partner with organizations that are, trying to solve, HR and compliance issues for their customers. So I'm gonna launch another poll. This would be for a company that's, a health insurance carrier, a HCM or a payroll organization, a benefits broker, a PEO company. So anyone who has a book of business where their clients, are are challenged with HR, and compliance issues and are looking for potentially, you know, wanting to offer, Meetra Tech solutions to those folks, you can go ahead and select a, yes. Please have someone reach out to me and our partner team will contact you. B, possibly, I'd like more information. Sounds kinda interesting, but not quite sure. There's an option for you there. And this... That is just basically... Yeah. I'd like to have a conversation and see where it goes. And then see if you're not interested in it. Obviously, you can select none at this time. So, thank you for participating in that poll. I'm gonna go ahead and close that out. And with that, I'm gonna turn it back to Cara for the q and a. Alright. So someone... I think this is on the training slide. It said... This says public contractors. Does this include government contractors? Government contracting... Public contracting is generally the same, I think. I might be misunderstanding the question, but I I think the answer is probably yes. If it says public contractors, that means if you have a contract with the government... With a a public agency, which would be the government. So if that was a surprise to you, then that might be something you wanna look into. Okay. How do you ask other employees about an accused person's behavior without it being spread throughout the company that this person is being investigated? So when you ask the other employees, you request strongly that they keep it to themselves. This gets a little sticky because arguably, it could be a violation of the NLRA to be like you can't say a single word about this. But we do want to emphasize the sensitive nature of the information that we are trying to protect everyone's privacy, that confidentiality is extremely important to this. The bottom line, you can't necessarily prevent the rumor mill. I mean, even if you threaten them with their job, which I would not recommend, they're gonna be... They're gossips. There are people who will just not be able to keep their mouth shut. So, really, the best thing you can do is is emphasize, that confidentiality is important and that you'd really like to keep this private because it's possible that, you know, maybe the accused employee didn't do anything and we really don't wanna start a rumor mill. Basically, firmly beg for them to, to be quiet about it and and to prevent that from happening. Unfortunately, like I said, some people are just goth ups. You can't necessarily prevent that. You just gotta sort of hope that the people you need to talk to about it, will will be reasonable and will understand the importance of of that confidentiality. Alright. If an employee submits a comprehensive account of an incident to their manager or HR, is it wrong to use that as their statement in the investigation and not directly interview them? It's not wrong, but I wouldn't recommend it, unless they don't want to be interviewed. I mean, if they submitted something that is literally pages long and they were like, I wanted to write this up, but I don't wanna talk about it, then that's fine. But I I feel like there's probably more to be said. Maybe not. If you feel like it is totally, totally comprehensive, then go ahead and don't don't talk to them. I mean, it seems like a weird choice to me. I would at least look at, a template like we've got for suggested interview questions of the person who's filing the complaint. If they have told you everything that was on that template, then I guess I'd feel better about not talking to them directly. But, again, I I wouldn't recommend it. I feel like there's probably always a bit more nuance. Most people don't like writing that much, so it's probably worth it. Also, if you end up getting sued about it, saying like, oh, we we just didn't talk to the the person bringing the complaint because they gave us a write up, that's... That seems weird to me. So that... That's my take on that. You could potentially get a different opinion from a different attorney. Not that that was legal advice. I'm just saying two two attorneys could potentially disagree on that point. Alright. HR has been told that a a department manager has threatened employees that if they go to HR, they will be fired. No one who has been threatened has come forward, yet somehow we found out about this. I've raised the issue to the manager's supervisor. The manager doesn't believe it. What should HR do? I mean, I would go directly to the person who was accused of threatening to fire people. I wouldn't talk to their supervisor. I would go straight to them and I would look them in the eyes and say, did you say this? And if they outright deny it, I would say, okay. Fine. Let's be clear, though. Don't ever say that, or you will be fired. So I I would go straight to the source on that. I mean, somebody told somebody about it. So it... I... That's something that that should be managed. Alright. What if an employee is clearly overly sensitive and in some cases even seems to be making harassment claims up and these conclusions were made after a formal investigation. Well, that's where you just document. Right? Like, you document the heck out of that. So if you do get investigated, get a demand letter, find yourself in litigation, whatever the case may be, You've got your documentation. You're like, we took this employee's account. She is historically sensitive. Here are examples of her being sensitive. We talked to all these other employees. We talked to other witnesses, and they didn't think it was offensive. They agreed that she's sensitive. This is this is a CYA situation, because, you know, this employee is is clearly going to be a problem, has been a problem. So, you know, you don't wanna go out punishing people just because she's too sensitive, or he's too sensitive, but we do we do wanna have some documentation that we looked into it. You know? We we checked it out, and we did an investigation, and our due diligence indicated that nothing bad was happening and that this person is just is just overly sensitive. So documentation is kinda your only solution there. Obviously, we don't wanna go out and fire the the sensitive individual. Otherwise, that looks like retaliation for having, in their mind, perhaps, earnestly reported things to HR. Someone gave an example of some really bad behavior that resulted in termination, and I think that is certainly the right choice there. All right. Let's see what else we got here. How to protect yourself with HR when stakeholders don't take advice seriously? This is a classic question. I get this pretty much every webinar, like, no matter what the topic. It's like, what do I do if basically the c suite won't listen to me and doesn't take any of this seriously? Honestly, if there's nothing you can do, maybe look for a new job. It is very uncommon for an HR professional to end up on the hook, like, legally, if they have made their best efforts to to prevent something. Like, it's really hard for you to be personally liable for these things, when you're working for a company. That is not a common thing. So I would not overly worry about personal liability. But I would document your efforts, you know, that, like, we talked to the CEO, we talked to the CFO who holds the purse strings, and they said, absolutely not. We're not investing in this, or we don't believe this complaint, and we're... We don't want you, you know, looking into it, whatever the the situation may be. I would document it just to show that you personally made a good faith effort. That might come up someday, probably not in a situation where you're being accused of being personally liable. I don't I don't think that's the real risk there. But, ultimately, there is only so much you can do in HR, you know, if you don't have control over a budget. So I feel for you, and, unfortunately, you are in good company with a lot of your your fellow professionals. Okay. I'll take one more. If an employee reports to HR that a sales employee called him a stupid idiot but requests that the incident only be documented and no further action be taken, does HR still have an obligation to address the behavior with the sales employee? Would it be appropriate to have a general conversation with the sales employee about professionalism and respectful workplace workplace conduct without mentioning the specific incident or identifying the employee who reported it? Yes. So I think I think your your second suggestion is a good one. Basically, don't have a conversation with the entire sales team because that won't land with the person it needs to land with. But like you said, have a conversation with that particular employee who said the mean thing about professionalism. I mean, presumably, the person who got called a stupid idiot doesn't want to be retaliated against by the person who called him a stupid idiot for having reported him. You know, that's probably not illegal harassment. It doesn't sound like it's based on a protected class. So, yeah, I would I would have that conversation with the sales employee, say, you know, we've heard reports that, you know, you're using some pretty crass, rude, mean language on occasion, and we want you to know that that's unacceptable. And if we hear about it again, there will be, you know, further steps taken. I think you're you're definitely, like, sort of on the right path there. Alright. Thank you all so much for being here today. Yes. Thank you for joining us for, this webinar. I put a link in the chat, that we have another MnRRL webinar coming up on October 27, ECA reporting readiness. So please join us for that. And if you have questions like these and you are a like these and you are a mineral customer, feel free to contact your mineral experts, and they'll be able to assist you. And with that, we wish everyone a great day, and thank you for joining us. Have a great day. Cheers. Okay. You need to come off stage.