How soon is too soon to start talking about harassment?If we're talking about your workplace, the correct answer is that it's never too soon. You should start talking to your employees about your anti-harassment / anti-bullying / respectful workplace policies, expectations, and culture on Day One. A discussion should be part of each new hire's on-boarding and orientation.
What about outside of your workplace?
If your employees come to you as bullies, no amount of respectful workplace training is going to reform them, and it will only be a matter of time before they harass someone and flame out.
Yesterday, my 7th grade daughter came home from school with a handout to let us parents know that, for the next three weeks, the middle school would be bringing in a local non-profit to provide age-appropriate sexual harassment prevention programming to the students.
The Healthy Relationship Boundaries Curriculum is … designed for student's 6th - 8th grade. We will be covering several important topics such as: personal boundaries, sexual harassment, and healthy relationship building skills. Each week there will be take home activities for the student to complete with their caregivers in order to continue ongoing preventative conversations at home, Please note, we are not teaching students about sex. Our main goal is to provide the tools to empower children to recognize sexual harassment and building healthy relationships.
We recognize that this is a very difficult subject to discuss with our children, but it is crucial to their physical, emotional, and mental well-being. Therefore, it is important for our children to possess the ability to recognize uncomfortable situations. We need to empower them with the knowledge to know what they can do if a situation like this occurs.
Bravo Lake Ridge Academy! Bullying and disrespect are such a huge problem in our society. Starting an age-appropriate dialogue with middle school students is crucial to helping halt this issues before they become Issues. Too often, we think that children are not mature enough, or need protection from difficult topics. To the contrary, this is exact issue to start a dialogue about the meaning of respect across genders. Otherwise, these children grow up with looser boundaries, and become adults (and your employees) with zero baseline on these critically important issues.
Today's schoolyard bullies will become tomorrow's workplace bullies. Thus, if you want to stop workplace harassment, then start educating our children about these issues.
* Image via Pixabay