Employment Law Training For Business

The Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act) Act makes a significant change to the law on an employer’s obligations to protect employees from sexual harassment. Although it has been watered down, the new law will still create an important new duty that employers will need to take seriously.

What is the new law?

There is a new duty to take “reasonable steps” to prevent sexual harassment of your employees in the course of their employment. This applies to sexual harassment as defined in the Equality Act, which means unwanted conduct of a “sexual nature”. Although the law has primarily been introduced to protect women, it applies equally to people of all genders.

The law already provides a defence to a harassment claim if the employer can show they had taken all reasonable steps to prevent it from happening. This meant it was advisable to take such steps, but there was no actual requirement to do so. The new law goes further by placing a separate legal obligation on all employers to take proactive measures to prevent sexual harassment.

How will it be enforced?

If an employee succeeds in a claim for sexual harassment, and the employer is found to have breached its duty to take reasonable steps to avoid the sexual harassment, the Employment Tribunal will be able to uplift compensation by up to 25%. Although this is only triggered if there has been sexual harassment, the uplift itself will apply to all of the compensation that has been awarded for any type of harassment. This could be expensive if an employee has succeeded in a claim for multiple incidents of harassment.

At HR School, we are in the process of getting ready to support businesses in putting measures in place to help prevent falling foul of this new requirement.   

We will be providing online sexual harassment training as well as guidance for HR and line managers between April and October 2024.

In the meantime, we recommend that your business starts to consider the following areas:

• Review and update policies and procedures
• Assess and take steps to reduce risk - different sectors may be more at risk than others
• Reporting - is it clear how and who to report a complaint of sexual harassment
• Is it clear how your organisation will handle a complaint?
• Dealing with third parties - harassment by a third part should be treated as seriously as that by a colleague 
• consider the exit interview process and the effectiveness of 121's as away of gleaning information from employees of where issues may lie

We know that there will be a lot to take in and consider. To get you started, the following links are useful guides from the Equality and Human Rights Commission:

Sexual Harassment and the Law

Short guide for employers on preventing sexual harassment at work

Why work with us?

Debbie Connors is a senior HR Professional and Nicola Howe is an Employment Law Trainer. Together they are able to offer training and support that equips you with the necessary legal knowledge as well as practical steps and application from an HR perspective. Our combined experience of over twenty years in the filed of HR means that we can offer pragmatic and practical support.