What Is Hostile Environment Sexual Harassment? How Can It Affect?
Hostile environment sexual harassment is continued and unwanted sexual advances, comments, or gestures. It can be perpetrated by anyone including juniors, peers, supervisors, or even customers in the case of businesses. It creates an abusive environment for workers and prevents them from doing their job effectively. It might not be sufficient to make legal claims for sexual harassment, but it does make workers uncomfortable. And hence, it becomes important to identify it and take action for the safety of the employee.
Keep reading to know more about how hostile work environment sexual harassment and how it affects employees.
What Exactly Hostile Sexual Harassment Means?
Hostile Sexual Harassment means harassment and discrimination towards an employee which is so severe that it prevents him from doing his job. It includes actions, comments, gestures and humor, which are deliberately of sexual in nature.
How Hostile Environment Sexual Harassment Affects Employees?
Here are some of the ways in which a hostile environment sexual harassment can affect the employees:
1. Traumatizes Employees
It traumatizes victims and causes immense emotional stress. It is also seen that victims often develop depressive symptoms and that their mental health is severely affected.
2. Lowers Productivity
Hostile environment sexual harassment lowers the productivity of the employees and thus also the productivity of the organization as the deteriorating mental health of the employee who has been a victim of harassment and the suffocating environment he finds himself in hampers his work and also the growth of the company.
3. Impacts Hiring
If an organization is
accused of maintaining a hostile environment at its workplace, then new
employees are hesitant in joining a place where there are chances of sexual
harassment.
It affects the hiring rate of the company and it misses out on a large pool of talent. Thus, in addition to an underperforming workforce due to a hostile environment, such an organization also faces problems hiring fresh talent.
4. Bad for The Brand
Cases of hostile environment sexual harassment when out in the open will also affect the brand name of the organization. This will also affect the attitude of customers towards the organization and lead to further decline in the business.
Hence, it becomes very
important to have the proper training for the workforce so that each employee
knows about the law relating to sexual harassment and its consequences for the
perpetrator. It helps to ensure the safety and security of the victim and an
environment that favors the growth of the employees and the organization. If
you want to know about the training courses available for employees to prevent
sexual harassment at workplaces, you can reach out to Evolve Technologies, Inc
for details of their services.
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