What is the duty of an employer?
According to the Equality Act 2010, sexual harassment is ‘unwanted conduct of a sexual nature which has the purpose or effect of violating someone’s dignity or creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment for them’. In 2023, the UK Parliament passed an amendment to this Act to encourage employers to take a more proactive approach to preventing sexual harassment at work. This new legislation, known as The Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act) Act 2023, comes into force on 26th October 2024.
Under this new duty, employers must take reasonable steps to ensure that workers are protected from sexual harassment. This preventative duty means that you should actively consider situations where employees could experience sexual harassment at work. You should then take proactive steps to prevent these scenarios from happening in real life.
As with all risks, compliance with this new duty is an ongoing process and should be applied regardless of whether or not you have received reports of workplace sexual harassment. Where you have received harassment complaints, you should act as you would any other incident and make appropriate changes to mitigate any further risk to your employees. With this new legislation, you also have a duty to prevent harassment from external parties, such as clients, contractors or customers who visit your workplace.
What are “reasonable steps” to take to prevent workplace sexual harassment?
This amendment to the Equality Act 2010 establishes that ‘reasonable steps’ should be taken to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace. But what exactly do we mean by ‘reasonable steps’?
All workplaces are different. As such, there is no definitive list of ‘reasonable’ steps to take when it comes to preventing workplace sexual harassment. That said, there are several factors that the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) considers important to determining the steps you should take. These include the size of your organisation and staff, the nature of the environment your employees work in, the time and cost involved compared to the overall benefit of steps taken, as well as any other areas of compliance specific to your sector, for example from the General Medical Council.
The EHRC encourages employers to consider what previous actions were taken to prevent sexual harassment and determine how reasonable and effective these were. As with any approach to workplace risks, if previous steps have been ineffective, you will be expected to change and improve your approach to preventing harassment.
What happens if you don’t comply with the new duty?
When it comes to non-compliance, there are significant consequences for employers who ignore their responsibility to prevent sexual harassment at work. Under this new duty, if an employee successfully wins an employment tribunal that involves a sexual harassment claim, and the employer is found to have failed to take reasonable steps to prevent harassment, then any compensation can be up to 25% higher than current levels. This could result in substantial increases in pay outs for employers in breach of their new duty.
As well as facing financial consequences, employers who fail to comply with this legislation are at risk of serious reputational damage. With workplace harassment now at the fore as an issue for government, organisations and workers, not complying with your health and safety responsibilities will negatively highlight your workplace culture. Organisations run the risk of losing future business, not to mention good employees who might think twice about joining your company if they don’t see you prioritising their safety at work.
4 things you can do to comply with your duty
Now we’ve looked at what this legislation means for employers, here are 4 actions you can take to ensure you are playing an active role in preventing sexual harassment in your workplace.
1. Carry out and maintain Risk Assessments
As with most areas of workplace health, safety and wellbeing, carrying out and maintaining a detailed Risk Assessment is key to preventing incidents and ensuring employee wellbeing. With this new legislation, employers must assess the risk of sexual harassment in their workplace. You should approach the process in the same way as with any other health and safety risk assessment. Consider all the potential risks associated with different areas of your organisation and who might be affected.
Remember: risk assessments are not static documents. Even after completing your Risk Assessment, you need to regularly review and update it. This way ensures you are doing the most you can to prevent incidents of sexual harassment. The emphasis on understanding and recording the potential risk of sexual harassment is imperative, according to the EHRC. Without this risk assessment, an employer is ‘unlikely to be able to comply with the preventative duty’ according to the guidance.
2. Have an action plan in place
Once you have completed your Risk Assessment, you must think about what steps you can take to mitigate the risks identified and start putting these into action. Working with your teams, decide who will be responsible for making any changes and who will monitor their effectiveness over time. Make sure this action plan is then shared with the relevant members of your team.
The EHRC guidance suggests that employers share these preventative measures not just with their employees, but with the wider public via their organisation’s website. This transparency demonstrates your commitment to preventing sexual harassment at work and encourages accountability from your staff, clients and customers.
3. Update your policies and procedures
Make sure your policies around sexual harassment – and harassment/abuse of all kinds – are up to date and effective. The EHRC provides detailed guidance on what robust anti-harassment policy should include. Their overall message is that it should be effective, well-communicated and ‘aim to prevent harassment and victimisation’. This includes having a clear and accessible procedure for staff to report and record complaints of sexual harassment should they occur.
Your employees should know who to report to, how their report will handled and what the next steps are. Equally, management and senior staff should feel confident to receive any reports of harassment and know how to proceed with complaints in a sensitive, timely and effective way.
When updating any workplace policy, make sure to communicate the changes that have been made. This might include adding an anti-harassment module to any upcoming staff training or sharing updates with external contractors, as well as communicating through your usual internal channels.
4. Maintain good employee engagement
When you consider what updates should be made to your sexual harassment policy, don’t forget to include your teams in the decision-making process. We know that high employee engagement plays an important role in improving safety outcomes. By communicating effectively with your staff, you can better understand where the risks lie and what actions would be most effective. You can do this through team training, small group sessions, surveys or even individual conversations. Give your teams options around how they would like to give feedback to ensure you get the most accurate picture of risk across your workplace.
Crucially, just because an incident of sexual harassment hasn’t been reported doesn’t mean that it hasn’t happened. When you proactively engage your employees in the risk assessment and reporting process, you show that you take your preventative duties seriously and that their voices will be heard. Together with effective anti-harassment policies in place, you can lower the risk exposure and better ensure your workers’ well-being.
How can Notify’s Safety Technology help you comply?
When it comes to complying with this new duty, Notify’s digital safety technology can help.
With Notify’s Risk Assessment software, you can quickly and easily create your sexual harassment Risk Assessments and share them with your workforce –in just a few clicks. You will be able to ensure that all employees have read and understood the risks associated with sexual harassment, as well as the control measures that you’ve put in place to help prevent sexual harassment from occurring in your workplace. This will also provide you with a digital audit trail to demonstrate compliance with the new duty, as well as giving your board / senior team assurance that your organisation is taking “reasonable steps” to prevent it.
With Notify’s Safety Intelligence dashboards, you can quickly get an overview of your risk management over time. This makes it easier to see where you are successfully mitigating risks and where you could do more to take preventative measures against harassment at work – or any other risk to health and safety.
If your workforce is unsure of how to create and complete a risk assessment, Notify also offers IOSH Certified Risk Assessment training via their partners WJSafe. This training will ensure your team have the skills required to conduct a thorough and accurate risk assessment. Not only that, but they will also do so on a digital system – Notify!
Notify’s Audits and Inspections module will enable you to create and complete sexual harassment checklists from anywhere, on or offline, via a purpose-built App. These checklists can consist of sections and questions about the working environment itself, outside of the working environment, people and management structures. You can assign the checklist to a dedicated person and schedule the date(s) / time(s) it needs to be carried out. From there, you can monitor if the checklist has been completed on time and to the right standard, helping to support compliance with the new duty.
Whilst conducting the checklist, your team can also add and assign corrective and preventative actions directly from within the App. With automated notifications for the person who has been assigned the action enabled, you can be assured that any additional control measures to prevent sexual harassment are implemented quickly.
Even though you have taken reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment in your workplace via risk assessments and checklists, your employees may still spot a sexual harassment incident occurring in your workplace. If this happened – you’d want to know about it, right?
Notify’s easy-to-use Incident Management App, enables employees to report sexual harassment incidents from anywhere, on or offline. Automated notifications and alerts can be configured, ensuring that the appropriate individuals are notified in real time. This leads to quicker response times, ensuring corrective actions are implemented swiftly to mitigate reoccurrence. Anonymous reporting is also available for employees who spot these incidents taking place. With Notify’s Safety Intelligence dashboards, you can also drill down into the incident data to view specific incidents related to sexual harassment which helps determine the root cause of the incident.
Lastly, Notify’s Document Management module enables you to store all of your policies, procedures and any training records around sexual harassment in one central location. Similar to the Risk Assessment module, you can visualise if documents have been read and understood by your workforce. Another benefit of having all documents stored in Notify, is the fact you can link document records together. For example, you can link your policy on sexual harassment to your sexual harassment risk assessment and/or checklist.
To see first hand how Notify can help your organisation prevent sexual harassment in your workplace, try the software for free.
