Sexual Harassment Nowadays, Essay Example

It is no secret that in most companies work time is lost due to texting and computer activities that are not work related.  As a result, some management personnel are delegated the task of monitoring the emails of all employees.  As the assistant human resource manager at Proctor and Gamble, that was one of my tasks.  One day I discovered an email sent from one employee to another that I considered sexual harassment.  According to Mika (2012), as an employer, I have a right to monitor employees’emails sent during work hours and to discipline or discharge offending employees.  Therefore, I could discharge the sender of the harassing email. However, if the discharged employee files a lawsuit of wrongful dismissal, (s)he could conceivably win and, as a result, cost the company a lot of money.  If, however, incidents of sexual harassments are ignored and a suit is filed and it goes to a jury trial, “the average award to a plaintiff in a sexual harassment suit is $225,000 to $275,000 says Paul Lopez , who directs the labor and employment practice at Tripp Scott Law Firm in Fort Lauderdale”(Kotz, 2011).

I would, therefore, tread wisely and ask both the sender and the recipient of the email to be in my office at a particular time and date, which would be as soon as possible.  I would ask the sender to tell both the recipient and me why that email was sent, what was hoped to be achieved by it.  I would also ask the recipient how (s)he felt upon receiving the email.  I would want to know if the receiver had sent any such emails to the sender and how many the sender had actually sent to the receiver—and to other employees as well.  If this was just an isolated case, and the recipient was not too affected by it and would not sue, I would not fire the sender, but place him/her on a three-month probation, with a copy in his/her file.  If any incident of any kind of sexual harassment surfaced during that time, the employee would immediately be fired.

Works Cited:

Krotz, J. L. (March 04, 2011).  How to handle sexual harassment in the workplace. Fox Small Business Center.  Retrieved on December 04, 2012, from http://smallbusiness.com/biz-on-main/.

Mika, K. (September 22, 2012).  The benefit of adopting comprehensive standards of monitoring employee technology use in the workplace.  Cornell HR Review. Retrieved on December 04, 2012, from http://www.cornellhrreview.org/the-benefit-of-adop.