How to Use Accountability to Fight Sexual Harassment in the Workplace

It seems like everyday we hear about yet another story about sexual harassment in the workplace. Have you wondered what is the best way to minimize the risk of this happening in your company?

A Culture of Accountability Is the Best Deterrent to Issues of Sexual Harassment in the Workplace 
When you analyze the implications of that question, you really have two main things to worry about:

• Reducing the chances of sexual harassment happening in the first place, and,
• Preparing to effectively and efficiently manage the event, if it does happen.

Use Accountability

Accountability is the key concept here. In a general sense, when accountability is embedded in an organization’s culture, and when it is transparent and directly tied to an individual’s performance evaluation, a high-performance organization is born. Execution, pride, quality, and overall employee satisfaction dramatically improve.
Combining a strong culture of accountability with clearly defined and stringent policies and processes for dealing with sexual harassment will act as a strong deterrent in itself.
In addition, when an actual sexual harassment event takes place, a strong culture of accountability will ensure that policies and procedures are followed and executed accurately and in a timely manner because everybody is exepcted to make sure it is so.

Make It Happen

The idea is to use accountability as both a deterrent as well as a management tool. The following are the high-level steps to get started:
Define and Communicate Policies, Processes, and Penalties for Dealing With Sexual Harasment in the Workplace 

Prevention and Deterrence

1. First, you must clearly define the policies, penalties, and processes to be applied and followed when an actual incident of sexual harassment takes place.
2. Second, you must clearly communicate these policies and processes to everybody. Include them in all new employee training materials and ongoing education events.
3. Next. require everybody to sign an annual acknowledgement that they have reviewed and that they understand these policies and processes.
4. Finally, let everybody know that an accountability tool like CommandHound will be used whenever these processes need to be executed. This will ensure that every participant in the process is held accountable for completing their assigned tasks on time, as expected, with no exceptions.

Management

1. When an actual sexual harassment event takes place, promptly trigger the execution of the policies and procedures that were defined and communicated for these type of events.
2. Use an accountability and task management tool like CommandHound to assign responsibilities and due dates, set up reminders and escalation procedures to make sure the outlined processes are relentlessly executed on time as expected.
3. Make sure that escalation dates and responsibilities are enforced and taken seriously as this further drives the sense of urgency and importance of completing their assigned tasks on time by everybody.
4. Drive accountability by connecting on-time completion performance at the individual level to each individual’s performance review process to highlight that the timely execution of this process is of utmost importance to the organization

Enabling Technology

Using a tool that drives and supports a culture of accountability in the workplace becomes even more critical when dealing with sensitive issues like sexual harassment in the workplace.
CommandHound was designed from the ground up with accountability in mind as a way to develop, enable, and drive business performance.

CommandHound can not only support task and project management efforts but it adds individual task completion performance tracking to drive accountability.
Would like to learn more about how CommandHound can enable a culture of accountability in the workplace and how it can effectively be used to deter and manage sexual harassment in the workplace?