eSignature Lawfulness for Addressing Harassement in Australia

How to eSign a document: eSignature lawfulness for Addressing Harassement in Australia

okay let's get to a bit of a change in Tech now because the federal government's amendments to sexual harassment laws following on from the respect at work inquiry are taking effect imminently employers are being advised to be aware of their heightened obligations in this space so to tell us more joy de poor from people and culture strategies Joy deep good morning to you please set the scene for us what is this a covering essentially yeah so so there has been some context and background to this Nadine over the last few years and very much influenced by the the metoo movement and all of the things that uh that fell out from that and were identified I guess as part of that uh that the federal government through the Australian Human Rights Commission uh conducted a very extensive inquiry in relation to how prevalent sexual harassment was and I think while there were numerous findings and recommendations made that the summary of all of that was very much that while there have been laws dealing with sexual harassment in Australia for the better part of 40 odd years they simply were not effective in terms of dealing with the real issues involving sexual harassment it was seen as being something that was too adversely consequential for people who were making complaints really low numbers of people actually making complaints as against who was experiencing sexual harassment and so the laws needed a pretty radical radical overhaul so that that's that's the background to it and uh the federal government as part of a number of changes made in the last six to nine months has fairly drastically ensured that employers are going to be held to far greater standards when it comes to what they do to prevent sexual harassment from occurring in their workplaces okay so what are some of these key changes in how this will be dealt with yeah so so one of the most significant changes is Fair Work Commission which is of course an institution that's existed albeit under different names for for over a hundred years and and has built primarily with industrial relations type issues bargaining Union disputes industrial action strikes Etc over the last 20 30 years has also dealt with individual employment disputes unfair dismissal claims and and similar things more recently it has started to deal with anti-bullying applications that that body the fair Work Commission is now going to be empowered to deal with sexual harassment in a very similar way to how it has been empowered in recent years to deal with anti-bullying complaints so what that means is that if an individual feels that they are being sexually harassed at work they are now able to go to the fair Work Commission and the idea is that they're meant to be able to get that complaint dealt with fairly quickly and they will have the power of the fair Work Commission that is to make certain order that that essentially provide a form of redress for that person who is experiencing sexual harassment the key difference here is that the the individual is meant to be going back to work and continuing to work as opposed to what has been the case up to now which is very much that typically a person only files a claim for sexual harassment after they've left a workplace and often they would they would say that the reason they left the workplace was because of the sexual harassment so the fair Work Commission is now being given all of these quite new and significant broad powers to address sexual harassment it's one of the major areas of change and that the second major area of change is in relation to the what the law talks about is positive obligations that employers now have which means they've got to have a lot more preventive Focus not just be reactive if someone's making a complaint okay so just let's delve in a little deeper to those positive duties because that's what business owners will have to really take seriously and start implementing when I mean what what does that involve yeah it's interesting Nadine I mean we we ran a a seminar earlier this week for for a number of our clients and uh sharing with them that uh the vast majority of employers in Australia are actually handling uh sexual harassment and discrimination in broadly a very similar way and that that approach up to now has been having my policy doing some kind of training in the majority of instances but most of that training is pretty ticker box and perfunctory what these changes now require an employer to do is be far more proactive and what that means in practice is that an employer can't just rely on a let's wait and see and let's only take decisive action if someone makes a complaint about something they have to be ahead of the game in other words they have to be monitoring and observing what are the risk areas that are that are existent within their organization at a most practical level if you've got an employee that um tells a lot of jokes shares a lot of personal information that would be considered to be inappropriate it might be of a sexual nature or whatever it's not enough just to say well look everyone seems to think that that's a joke no one's really minding no one seems upset so we'll just let it go under these new laws and and arguably this is what employers should have been doing anyway but it's now been crystallized into more severe consequences if they don't a manager a leader within that organization needs to be responding to that kind of behavior identifying that as a risk understanding that that could be contributing to another person's work environment being made hostile which is the language that the law is using for the first time in Australia it's been used that way in north in North America for for a number of decades they've got to take proactive steps to address that you can't just wait for a complaint wait for something to go wrong you've got to be a lot more proactive