Sexual harassment claims increasingly expose your organization to significant business, financial, and human resources related costs and liabilities.  Potential claims now often exceed six-figure numbers. More importantly, sexual harassment increases recruitment and hiring costs, increases absenteeism and turnover costs, lowers employee morale, reduces job performance, and results in lost productivity.As a result, if your company has a 6% profit margin, it will have to generate $1,667,000 in new sales to cover the costs of each sexual harassment claim or award of $100,000.  

Thus, while the financial liabilities of sexual harassment can be substantial, they represent only a part of the total cost.To the extent sexual harassment defines how your organization values its employees, your organization increasingly becomes a place to avoid.To the extent your organization accepts of sexual harassment as an incidental working condition, you tell employees, applicants, and third parties: we don’t value you. And to the extent your organization does not take immediate action to correct problems, you demonstrate that they should look for employment elsewhere. 

The marketplace is increasingly asking and evaluating the following critical questions:

• Does the organization avoid the growing legal pitfalls to avoid sexual harassment
• Does the organization properly conduct sexual harassment and workplace investigations
• Does the organization properly weight and balance privacy issues and concerns
• Are all employees encouraged to report incidents of sexual harassment; are all supervisors and managers required to take action and report incidents

These critical issues and other important elements of an effective sexual harassment program will be discussed.