Harassment at work

larscl · October 2007

Harrassment is such a touchy subject.....I currently have 2 employees who want to file employee greivances against other fellow employees....I talked to our production manager and she asked me..."Why are employees coming to you?" I stated that they must not be getting satisfaction from their supervisors. Obviously this is something I must address as harassment is not tolerable here. My problem is that I am not out there seeing these things happen....[:S] how do I know who is telling me the truth...it seems in these situations the employees will have different versions of the story and the supervisors will have yet another version. I am the one who wrote the last posting about employees vs. mgmt. I guess my biggest frustration is that I feel a real breakdown in communication and discipline and it seems that I am not getting support from the production manager at all in fact just the opposite. It appears she doesn't want her employees to communicate with me. I have been dealing with this production manager for 4 years now. Our plant even brought in a consultant to coach her......not a lot has changed in my opinion. I have gone to my superiors and explained how I feel about this production manager to no avail. I truely believe she is a root cause of a lot of the disfunction here. Any advice anyone?

regdunlop · October 2007

at this point i think your priority should be conducting a thorough, fair, impartial, and effective investigation of the complaints. your company has been put on notice of potential harassment and must now conduct an investigation. see the article below for some advice on conducting the investigation. you might also want to search on this site and other sites for other tips.

http://hr.blr.com/analysis.aspx?topic=30&collapse=false

HRgsf · October 2007

I agree about investigating. If things go from bad to worse, you don't want to have to try to explain why you didn't conduct an investigation. It's better to err on the side of caution and do the investigation. If there isn't enough information to confirm that there's been harassment, then that's what you put in your summary document. If there's confirmation of the allegations, then it's better to know about it and take action than let it develop into something worse. Good luck and I hope it turns out okay!

kockler · October 2007

I totally agree with the previous posts - investigate, and the sooner the better! The worst thing you could do for yourself and your company is delay the investigation or ignore the complaint completely!

larscl · October 2007

I am definitely investigating. No question about it! I guess it just gets really hard when the production manager is always hot on my heels wondering why I need to talk to "her employees".

IT HR · October 2007

I think everyone else has made the point about investigating - that's a given. I guess I would go one step further and start getting all the evidence you need together on this manager. There have been a number of times in my career in HR that I have had to make my case about a manager that the powers to be didn't want to hear about the first time I brought it to their attention. You have to try again. You have mentioned several things in your postings that really concern me about this manager. Communication is imperative in a production environment. If she is unwilling to make a change and help herself and her employees then you need to be the voice of all of her employees to the powers to be. It is not going to be easy. Believe me I understand were you are coming from - been there done that! Make sure you have specific examples. This investigation may be another specific example that you need. I am sure if you have some general conversations with the production employees they will give you other specific examples to make your case.

Harassment at work

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