To protect your business from sexual harassment suits, make sure you not only have a policy but that employees know what it is and that your managers are enforcing it.
“If you have a policy and you don’t enforce it or disseminate it, and employees are either not aware or ignorant of it, then it demonstrates you have a culture where you do the minimum,” says Joel Makee, partner with Taft, Stettinius & Hollister. “You have to show employees have access to it. If you have maintenance guys working in the plant who don’t have computers, but your policy is on a computer, then you have a problem. You have to have several different mechanisms to get the policy out.
“If you have a set of policies and nobody knows about them, then it’s just window dressing. It doesn’t demonstrate a genuine culture where you are serious about the law and society and how your company complies with the law.”
