Reflective Brief on Sexual Harassment
Purpose
Sexual harassment remains a common human resource issue than it is thought to be especially in the workplace set up. It presents a challenge to many female employees since it is a sensitive arena associated with cultural values of an individual worker. It does not only pertain to sexual intercourse in a workplace, but it can be in the form of sexually suggestive remarks, sexual favors, sexual advances or any other physical conduct of sexual nature. Sexual harassment has a significant impact on job satisfaction and turnover rate among female workers. A higher percentage of women who have at one time experienced sexual harassment quit the workplace while some have low productivity due to minimal job satisfaction. The psychological effect caused by sexual harassment is immense thus; policies should be implemented to curb the issue of sexual harassment in the organizational workplace.
Background
Workplace misconduct claims are increasingly making headlines at an alarming rate especially sexual harassment. Sexual harassment in the workplace differs from one workplace to another with women being at a higher risk of sexual harassment. Gender sexual harassment and seductive harassment are more prevalent as compared to sexual assault, sexual bribery and sexual coercion making it a great concern to human resource. Recently, stories are all over about male executives being fired from their positions due to sexual harassment in their workplace. Although most organizations employ zero-tolerance policy for any form of harassment, it is hard for human resource to identify the cases unless the issue is reported to them. Unfortunately, most of the sexual harassment cases go unreported due to fear of embarrassment, colleagues being fired or issue not taken seriously.
Discussion
Every employer fear is being fired because of workplace-related issues. They find it a responsibility of human resource to enhance workplace policies that protect employees from any form of misconducts. The human resource is expected to take every employee complaint seriously regardless of who it is involving. Women and girls are the victims of sexual harassment not only in the workplace but also in universities and their apartments. Gender makes them vulnerable to such cases and their differences from male counterparts. Women are said to be sexually harassed because they are women and when men are harassed, the assumption is that they are weak and feminized which is not the case. Human resource should set policies that protect both male and female from the issue. The policy should encourage reporting of any workplace misconduct so that sexual harassment issue ceases to be a major human resource issue in the contemporary world.
Conclusion
Although most of the cases of sexual harassment go unreported, the issue remains significant to the modern workplace. This is due to decreased psychological disturbance associated with it which leads to reduced job satisfaction and high rate of employee turnover.