Harassment by nonemployees: how should employers respond?

HR Magazine, Dec, 1996 by Diana L. Deadrick, Scott W. Kezman, R. Bruce McAfee

Training programs. Employee training programs typically explain all the topics covered in the harassment policy. However, employers may want to expand their training to include conflict management skills, teaching employees how to confront harassment by nonemployees directly. Although both employers and employees have responsibility for preventing harassment, the employees themselves are the only ones who can target mild, "innocent," or annoying behavior and prevent it from becoming illegal harassment.

Several useful "self-defense" techniques can be applied to situations of harassment by nonemployees. For mild forms of harassment, a polite request, such as simply asking the offending nonemployee to refrain from engaging in the harassing behavior can be used. An employee using this technique might say, "Would you please not tell religious jokes in my presence? I take my religion seriously and don't appreciate the jokes."

For more severe forms of harassment, the employee could tell the offending nonemployee that the conduct is offensive, putting him or her on notice that action will be taken if the harassment persists. For example, "You have repeatedly singled me out as the butt of your jokes whenever I make sales calls to your company. Because I take pride in my ethnic heritage, your jokes upset me. I want and expect these jokes to stop. If they continue, I will report it to my supervisor as harassment."

Supervisors also need to learn how to confront abusive nonemployees. Training programs can parallel the self-defense training given to employees and focus on the same types of harassment situations. For mild forms of harassment, supervisors could use various customer relations techniques designed to persuade offenders to change behavior while not antagonizing them. For example, "Would you please not tell ethnic jokes in the presence of our wait staff. Some of them find these jokes offensive. We appreciate your cooperation."

For the handling of harassment situations that are more severe or frequent, managers need to learn what they can do to stop offenders - remove them or permanently bar them from the premises. Training could even include a discussion of when it may be necessary to take legal action such as obtaining a peace bond against an offender, charging an assailant with assault, or filing a suit for slander or infliction of emotional distress.

Since the specific approach to be taken when dealing with severe cases depends on the specific situation, employers should seek legal counsel before conducting this training. For employers already providing customer service training to supervisory and nonsupervisory employees, it should be relatively easy to incorporate these or other similar conflict resolution techniques into the training program.

MONITOR HARASSMENT BY NONEMPLOYEES

To learn the frequency and severity of nonemployee harassment, employers need to develop information-gathering procedures specific to this problem. A questionnaire or survey given to all employees, or to a particularly vulnerable group of employees, can help determine whether harassment by nonemployees is a problem and where the problem is most pronounced.