Humans are complicated. They get sick, they have families, they come to you with not just their services but a complicated tangle of heritage, beliefs, relationships, and feelings. If the complex totality of the human condition weren't the very fabric of life, it would be a tremendous pain in the ass - especially for an employer.
I'll let Denver-based attorney and long-time EEOC veteran Merrily Archer explain the superior alternative.
I'll let Denver-based attorney and long-time EEOC veteran Merrily Archer explain the superior alternative.
...Click the link below to read more.
Yes, if only it were so. Futurists and science-fiction authors may speculate about the actionability of replacing a defective Roomba under the Americans with Disabilities Act, and economists smarter than me probably already have plenty to say about anti-discrimination laws' affect as as expediters of the automation process. I, however, am very glad that sapience remains a pre-requisite for at least some jobs. And until the androids come for the rest of our jobs, lurching arms-out into your HR manager's office metallic-monotoning "(ex)-TERMINATE YOUR HUMAN EMPLOYEES!," you are as subject to the vicissitudes of anti-discrimination laws as anybody else.
My partner and I help businesses build their compliance and training programs all the time and it is sometimes shocking to me how much of the advice I have to give boils down to "just act like a grownup at work." When I was still in the world of general counsel, I once found myself aghast at a report that an educated grownup (male) had poured a bottle of cream-colored hand lotion down the back of a (female) coworker's pants, on an open sales floor. The risk exposure analysis practically writes itself, but what you really want to do is grab the little lawsuit-magnet by the scruff of his upturned collar and just smack a little common sense into him.
Discrimination laws were designed by people of good intent to protect workers from truly bad behavior - racism, sexism, racial and religious bigotry, so on. Truly bad behaviors. For some people, though, there seems to be some weird grey area between horseplay and harassment, between being old-school and being off-color. If only there were some objective metric for how much friendly banter has to happen before a misogyny-laced joke becomes acceptable, or how many times you have to shake hands before a smack on the bottom is funny and familial and not weird and liability-generating.
Oh wait, there is: just don't.
Our consultancy provides training and mock-interview trials for managers, supervisors, HR professionals, and ordinary employees because, to the delight of the plaintiffs' bar, not everybody in America has been briefed on acceptable workplace behavior according to the statutes and caselaw that govern the right of employees to be safe from discrimination at work. Until you can replace everybody at your business with a robot and enjoy the narrow slice of time between the robot revolution and the adoption of anti-discrimination laws by the robot Congress, you have to just treat your people like grownups. Like humans.
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