First Healthcare Compliance CONNECT September 2020

Q&A: How Workplace
Communication Mitigates
Harassment
Catherine Short
Warren Cook BS, MBA, MS, SHRM-certified of
SymbianceHR, will be presenting the webinar How
Workplace Communication Mitigates Harassment
on September 22 at 12 pm ET. In anticipation of this
webinar, Warren answered many commonly asked
questions on our blog in relation to communication
and harassment in the workplace:
Why do you relate communication as a key
problem to harassment in the workplace?
The lack of respectful communication and appreciation
for diversity of thought leads to behaviors that evolves
into harassment. Without the development of respectful
communication intent versus impact can be lost,
providing others dignity and respect is absent and
the establishment of trust is non-existent. When this
communication breakdown happens, individuals will
allow their biases to surface and influence how they
interpret their environment and the reasons why things
happen. As a result, they begin to communicate in a
negative manner without respect for others which can
often lead to comments and behaviors unacceptable in
the workplace that manifest into harassing behavior.
You touched the topic of inclusion during the
presentation, I thought that had to do with
diversity – can you clarify?
Inclusion is often aligned with Diversity and is well
recognized in recent years as a two-part process
of establishing a more effective workplace. This is
true however in the context of communication and
harassment prevention, I believe that the improvement
of communication in the workplace to include respect,
dignity and diversity of thought requires people to be
inclusive of other people’s ideas and contributions.
The clarifying factor in this context is the inclusion
has nothing to do with protected characteristics such
as gender, race, national origin or sexual preference.
Instead the inclusion is based on encouraging
communication and engagement across functions,
departments, units and teams to raise the level of
engagement across the entire workforce. Training
on this type of inclusion leads to civil and equitable
treatment of all people outside the scope of diversity
alone however still addresses the ability to mitigate the
risk and liability of harassment in the workplace.
Why do you believe leadership involvement
is so important to mitigating harassment,
employees often harass each other and not
managers?
The ability to model the behavior you expect from
others is critical for a leader. To create followership
and earn the respect from the workforce to follow
the leader requires the leaders in the organization
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