Sexual Harassment at Work: What Your Business Is Now Legally Required to Do

What Does “Reasonable Steps” Mean for Your Business?

The specific actions required will depend on your company’s size, resources, and past incidents. However, there are key strategies all businesses can adopt to stay compliant and proactive.

Here’s our 8-step guide to help you navigate these changes and protect your employees from sexual harassment:

1. Update Your Sexual Harassment Policy​

Review your current policies to ensure they comply with the new law. Consider whether you need a dedicated sexual harassment policy or if a broader harassment policy covering multiple forms of discrimination is more effective. Make sure it’s clear, up-to-date, and easily accessible to all employees.

2. Engage Employees Through Communication

Conduct regular one-on-ones, employee surveys, and exit interviews. This helps uncover hidden issues and fosters open communication, making employees feel their concerns are heard and
respected.

3. Assess Your Workplace Risk

Perform a workplace risk assessment to identify areas where sexual harassment is more likely to occur, such as isolated workspaces or power imbalances. Create an action plan to mitigate these risks, and set up a system to monitor and review progress regularly.

4. Introduce an Anonymous Reporting System

Offer employees a way to report issues anonymously, either through an online portal or an independent phone-based service. This can encourage staff to report concerns without fear and help you address problems early.

5. Train Managers and Staff

Training is a critical component of prevention. Managers need to be equipped to handle allegations of harassment sensitively and effectively. All employees should understand what constitutes sexual harassment, what behaviours are unacceptable, and the steps to take if they experience or witness harassment.

6. Respond to Complaints Quickly and Fairly

Act swiftly and sensitively when a complaint arises. Make sure the resolution process reflects the employee’s preferred outcome and follow up to ensure the issue is fully addressed.

7. Address Third-Party Risks

If your employees interact with customers or clients, implement strong reporting mechanisms to address potential harassment from third parties. Ensure you take all reasonable steps to protect your employees, especially when working alone.

8. Monitor, Evaluate, and Adapt

Regularly review your action plans, policies, and training programs. Measure their effectiveness by analysing trends and gathering feedback from your team. Adapt your strategies as needed to ensure ongoing compliance and maintain a harassment-free workplace.

Stay Ahead with Expert Guidance

Navigating these new requirements can be challenging, but Limelite HR is here to help. We offer comprehensive support to ensure businesses implement the necessary steps for compliance.

If you need help reviewing your sexual harassment policy or training your managers, get in touch.

Book a free 30-minute discovery call

The people we support, supporting us:

• At YMCA Worcestershire, we have been through a period of substantial change and development. As part of this we refreshed our vision, mission and values. We also did some solid work in creating a strategic framework with top line objectives. While we had done some preliminaries on further development of this into measurables, a challenge of capacity issues with a need for more operational focus was emerging. We were keen to get through this bottleneck because we knew the strategic planning and implementation would help to ease the operational challenges.

  We were very grateful to get Workforce Planning support for this through consultancy work with Limelite HR who reviewed what we’d done so far, liaised with key staff members and helped us to harness this into a more complete and workable format. This is now enabling us to have a clearer road map in our efforts and a means by which to monitor progress and will, in this respect, enhance our impact for those we serve in our charitable and transformative work. We very much appreciated the timely help with this – thank you to Workforce Planning and Limelite HR!

  Dr Annette Daly, CEO
  YMCA Worcestershire

• Limelite HR & Learning recently supported me, our Trustees and our team at the Maternal Mental Health Alliance through a review of our terms and conditions. It was a great experience from start to finish.  Their guidance was balanced and they really understood the nuance of our specific situation as a small charity. Relationships are at the heart of all they do and this is reflected in such a positive outcome.  They are incredibly pro-active, write brilliant and succinct reports. I cannot recommend them highly enough.

  Laura Seebohm, CEO 
  Maternal Mental Health Alliance 

• Firstly, thank you for turning the report around so quickly – much appreciated.

  Secondly, and even more importantly, I wanted to say what an impressive piece of work it is. The skills is in interpreting the data you’ve gathered and presenting it in a meaningful way, and you’ve absolutely nailed it. Well done!

  Louise Skittrall, CEO
  Robinson Grace

• The offsite has been extremely impactful and the team are working better together since, they often state this improvement is down to the time we spent with your support! It was fabulous to finally work with you and it was just as I thought it would be – you (and Helen) nailed it!

  MD 
  McLaren Applied

• Limelite HR held a group session as part of its management development programme for a number of us from an SME, where we all work remotely.

  Rebecca Miles, Managing Editor, Business and Vertical IT Publications
  Lynchpin Media