Speaking at the Diversity and Inclusivity Finance Forum (DIFF) leadership event, Nicki Eyre, founder and managing director of Conduct Change, said a recent amendment of the Equality Act 2010 that came into effect in October 2024 means employers have a “preventative duty” to prevent sexual harassment of their employees.
“You have to be proactive; you have to anticipate all of the different areas where problems might occur and where sexual harassment behaviours may occur,” Eyre noted.
She pointed to the European Human Rights Court’s technical guidance, which outlines an eight-step guide for employers to combat sexual harassment and harassment in the workplace.
This includes developing an effective anti-harassment policy, engaging with staff, assessing and taking steps to reduce risks in your workplace, reporting, training on what to do when a harassment complaint is made, dealing with harassment by third parties and monitoring and evaluating actions.
Eyre said the “entire employee journey” needs to be examined, from recruitment to training, learning and development and environment.
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Looking at specific parts of the process, Eyre said employers should make sure all workers are aware of anti-harassment policies, and they should be in easily accessible and externally facing parts of the website.
She added that on the risk assessment side, it was crucial for there to be input from multiple areas of the business, as “one person sitting in a room doing risk assessments” will not include all the potential risks, especially for vulnerable groups like disabled people, people of colour or women.
“You need to engage the voices of those vulnerable groups in your organisation, as well as having a senior leader who is really going to push forward and take the lead on this work,” Eyre said.
Third parties also need to be examined, whether that is someone coming in for a job interview, contractors, trainers or speakers, in terms of identifying risks and how they can be managed.
She noted that it was vital for businesses to monitor and evaluate the efficacy of their anti-harassment policies to see if things were changing.
“A lot of organisations will say they don’t have a problem. This is with sexual harassment, harassment and bullying, [companies will say] we don’t have a problem as nobody’s reporting it.
“There’s a reason nobody is reporting it; because when we do, when they speak up, when they share their concerns, they are the ones who end up losing their job, losing their role, losing their career and possibly becoming ill,” she explained.
Persistent harassment can trigger complex PTSD
Eyre said that when harassment behaviours are persistent and occur on a daily or weekly basis, the person will go into a “fight or flight response”, and that could end up leading to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or complex trauma.
This will have physical symptoms such as headaches and fatigue, as well as psychological symptoms like anxiety, depression, panic attacks and a heightened sense of threat, which can lead to “hypersensitivity”.
“’Oversensitive’ is an opinion. Do not use that phrase ever about anybody,” she said.
All of this together can also impact cognitive functioning, which will impact home and work life.
“Socially, you’ll start to withdraw… you might [not] want to go to the work events, where things might be worse, and you’re probably going to disengage from your events outside of life as well, and perhaps even stop doing some of the things you enjoy.
“People’s personality might change, they might become angry or feel a real sense of injustice, particularly if they’ve reported something and then it’s kind of turned around on them,” she explained.
Eyre said that there was also an impact on businesses, as social media and sites like Glassdoor will be used if victims feel like they are “not being heard”.
A study from the University of Manitoba comparing companies that had sexual harassment complaints on Glassdoor to similar companies without them found that those with complaints suffered a loss of around 20% compared to an increase of 150%.
Firms need to recognise and mitigate poor behaviour before it escalates
Eyre called on businesses to embrace the Recognise, Resolve and Recover approach to harassment.
The Recognise stage involves seeing poor behaviour, recognising it and its risks and taking steps to mitigate it.
The Resolve Stage involves informal enquiry and sensemaking, followed by an informal complaint.
The Recover stage is a formal complaint and then legal redress, which is a last resort.
“We’re not actually doing a lot of work in that bottom zone, and so what happens is the risk increases. It increases for the individual – risk of losing their job, a risk of trauma – and it increases for business in terms of reputational damage.
“What we need to do is we need to do a huge amount of [work] bottom-end in the recognised learning, we need to recognise the behaviours. We need to recognise the risks, and we need to take some steps to mitigate those.
“If it does escalate, does occur, then we need to find different ways of resolving them. Are we training people? Are we coaching people? Are we getting them to understand their behaviour, the impact of their behaviour? Some of the behaviours can be changed. It’s not a blanket approach of if somebody does something wrong, they have to be sacked, but if they consistently do something wrong, then you have to have the resolve to get rid of them,” she said.
