Sexual Harassment...or is it?

dchr9203

Good grief! What is it about HR that the stuff hits the fan first thing on Monday when you worked your tail off on Friday to position yourself on Monday to get something constructive done!? Here's the deal. We are a government contractor with employees and customer employees working together. We had a customer and our Program Manager "counsel" a female employee about how a rumored dating relationship with another contracting employee could be perceived as an OCI violation; supposedly in the context of "you're a valuable employee and we're not telling you who to date; just want you to be aware of the possible ramifications, etc". I'm told the meeting went well, lasted couple of hours; basically a "friendly discussion". Now, the female employee is claiming that this customer has been harassing her for over a year and that the meeting last week was his attempt to get a name of whomever she's seeing (because she has refused to date the customer). Now the employee claims she feels threatened. Any first-hand experience out there? I already know that now that she's levied the accusation, we as the employer have to investigate, etc. Aside from my suspisions that all is not as it seems, my dilema is the alleged "harasser" is not our employee. He is a government contractor/customer employee, which is unlike dealing with a sales rep or a patron-type customer. should the HR of the customer's employer be contacted and brought in to investigate on their own behalf? I will probably end up contacting our legal rep, but wanted to glean wisdom from the ranks first.

Whatever

We had an incident about two years ago when a highly inappropriate comment was made by a buyer from another company to one of our ees . I contacted the head of HR at the buyer's company and we then cooperated in the investigation.

Pricehcs

Agreed on the cooperation aspect. I've had situations of allegations from our employees where clients have harassed them. I have always found my peers in the client organizations equally zealous in their efforts to follow through on the investigation and even come to agreement on future working relationships between our two organizations. For example, we have crafted arrangements where a specific client individual is prohibited from working on our project for an indefinite period of time and is required to attend harassment/sensitivity training by their firm. Our employees have been quite pleased with the firm's willingness to press these issues in the face of possibly upsetting client relations. I have yet to find a client organization that did not treat it with equal importance on their end.

Be prepared for the "he said/she said" component as well, as the disagreement in their stories can be magnified even more than usual by them being in separate organizations. Ultimately, separating the two parties involved while trying to maintain the business relationship has worked best in my previous encounters...


#1 thing a consultant shouldn't say: "I could tell you the answer right now, but we're committed to a three month project..." #-o

Crout

What is an "OCI volation?" And if the customer is not an emmployee, what the heck was he doing sitting in a meeting with your employee? All that muddy water aside, you clearly must investigate the complaint BEFORE you make a determination that it doesn't rise to the level of sexual harrassment. After you investigate, I suppose you could argue that it's not sexual harrassment because the customer doesn't have real work-place power over the accuser. However, the meeting that I metioned above would probably disprove that.

System

My first reaction was the same as Crout's - why was a customer ever allowed in on that meeting? That's appalling. The meeting should have been with the General Manager only.

But now this employee has come to you with a complaint. If you are the one who handles them, then I'm sure you've been trained on how to do the investigation. If you determine that there's some validity to the complaint, then even this customer should be talked to and given boundaries just like you would with any other customer or contractor. But now it appears unlikely that the GM can talk to him since they've already seemingly developed a rapport. Can you inform the GM that you will be talking to the customer? Will the GM insist on handling it himself? You have a tough one, but you can do it.

marc

This sounds like it could get a bit sticky. I know the investigation still needs to happen, but I can just imagine the trauma the EE is experiencing if her tale is true.

I agree that it was inappropriate for the customer to be involved and for your Program Manager to join in looks a bit conspiratorial. That said, it is either OK for the EE to date the customer ees or not. If it is not, your policy should spell it out. If it is OK, then both the company and the customer should keep their noses out of it.

I expect the HR dept for the government EE would climb all over their EE for being involved in this incident and if their is any truth at all to your EEs complaint, I expect the government EE will be in very hot water. This sort of thing could blow up in everyone's face.

dchr9203

The "nature" of our business relationships is one in which our customers are very involved with our employees and in some cases manage them (and are many times why the employee was hired to begin with). Customer was allowed and involved because he was the one who brought the concern. Again, it was not a formal meeting nor discipline session; just a sit-down and lets make sure you understand the rules and consequences. While I don't agree with this level of involvement, it is unfortunately one of those cultural things I have to work around and hope to change eventually (with ammo from situations just like this one). OCI violation is related to government intelligence issues and sharing of company info with competitors, yada. The whole issue sounded hoakie to begin with, but I don't work in a secured area on a government site, so I have to defer to the "experts" there; in this case our PM. As I said, I already know I have to investigate it from our employer's perspective, and suspect that the other employer needs to be involved, just wanted first-hand experience on when to get them involved. I've got a call into our legal counsel to see what they think. I'll let you know.

Crout

>Again, it was not a formal meeting nor
>discipline session; just a sit-down and lets
>make sure you understand the rules and
>consequences.

If they called her into the room, then it's a formal meeting. If they outlined rules and consequences, then the meeting is disciplinary in nature. This is an interesting dynamic. Please keep us posted. Thanks.

mwild31

[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON 08-02-04 AT 06:50PM (CST)[/font][br][br]"Again, it was not a formal meeting nor discipline session; just a sit-down and lets make sure you understand the rules and consequences."

Here's a tough lesson that I've learned, from the ee perspective there's no such thing as "just a sit-down meeting to go over RULES and CONSEQUENCES" when the boss is in the room. It's ALWAYS elevated from the ee perspective. So, however the PM and the "customer" presented it, it sounds like the ee took it differently.

On a side note, I'm all for managers and supervisors managing their ee's, but in this case, was there a call in to HR before the meeting - did HR even know of their concerns? I guess I'm a control freak, but at my company I'm uncomfortable with any of my managers proceeding with this type of conversation without first chatting with me about it - I don't necessarily need to be there, but I like to be informed.

IF this case were to get ugly and attorney's got involved, then I think your company could be in a pickle and will probably spend a lot of money trying to convince the judge/jury that this "customer" was not in fact an agent of the employer (you) since the line seems to be blurry at your company regarding the amount of influence a "customer" has with YOUR ee's. Doesn't mean that you won't win, I really don't know, but I imagine a lot of money coming out of your company's pocket (just in the wonderful world of dueling attorney letters alone) on this topic. Good luck your investigation and when you determine the results, just be as proactive as you can. Good luck!

deniseE

Check your contract/agreement with this group-maybe it provides for this situation. We also frequently have consultants in the building and we've begun to think about including language regarding joint employment issues.

Once we have approved language, I'd be happy to share.

dbutton111

My God, I think we're twins! At least we live the same life apparently. I'm also with a gov't contractor and about 80% of our employees work at gov't sites and are managed on a daily basis by the customer. We have "program managers" but they are located here at our headquarters and most of our employees never meet them. (1100 employees, 42 states, 250+ locations, 33% plus turnover annually - no physical way to see all of them).

What I generally do with these type of complaints, and they're much more frequent then I ever would have imagined, is I do a full interview of the employee and any other of our employees that she/he names. If there is absolutely, no way in heck, no possible way that there is any alleged violation then I state to the complaning employee that I found no violation and I also report to the customer's HR dept that a complaint was filed by our employee to us and that I found nothing. If I find even a possible shred of evidence that something happened I contact the HR person and let them know. It is then in their court.

On occassion the customer welcomes me to do a full fledged investigation with them and then I do so, interviewing anyone and everyone they will allow me to talk to.

It is a sharp edged sword we walk on. Not a strong enough investigation then we're on the hook for a harassment claim. If we go about it too forcefully then we're seen as a problem contractor by the customer and miraculously our work dries up at that site.

For those interested, OCI is Organizational Conflict of Interest and applies to gov't contracts and the requirement to ensure that there is no "mixing" of people that would look like the contractor is getting a free ride. For example, if we hire someone who is released from the military, we have to ensure that he doesn't work on any projects that he had prior control of (this is a VERY basic interpretation and there are miriad (sp?)ways around it sometimes where you're not even close to crossing the line).

dchr9203 - I think we need our own forum. Maybe call it "those HR weenies who are stuck between the feds, their company, and the laws".

dchr9203

It wasn't. We did a formal investigation; the worst thing was that the boundaries between personal and working friendships got blurred and crossed and one party felt the other was overstepping professional boundaries. We formally notified both that although not a Sex Har Hst Env, both were expected to conduct within acceptable boundaries, yada. We will be working to move the employee to another area as soon as an opportunity allows. Onward and upward!