In our Online Sexual Harassment Prevention training your employees will learn and apply the important skills of handling sexual harassment issues and complaints. This hands on workshop thoroughly addresses the elements of how to prevent unacceptable behavior. The class includes a detailed overview of what sexual harassment is, explains legal definitions, discusses sexual harassment prevention, and shows how to handle sexual harassment complaints and maintain a positive work environment.

For more information about individual sexual harassment training courses

Taking A Global View of Sexual Harassment

To maintain successful business operations overseas, it helps to understand your international liabilities.

As trade becomes increasingly international, more U.S.-based businesses are taking advantage of new opportunities abroad. Yet, in their haste to "go global," some U.S. employers mistakenly give short shrift to labor and employment concerns.

Such a mistake can be devastating. Employment-related costs and exposure to liability often play a pivotal role in the success or failure of businesses that decide to operate across borders and time zones. Employers can find themselves in serious legal and financial trouble if they fail to consider the actual costs of having employees who work abroad. These costs can include compliance with foreign employment statutes, regulations, treaties and the extraterritorial reach of U.S. employment laws.

Foreign labor problems can have severe consequences and sometimes paralyze, if not frustrate completely, international expansion efforts. Of the potential legal risks employers may face, one of the most serious is liability for sexual harassment.

International HR Strategies

Employers often are surprised to discover fundamental tensions between their own corporate code of conduct and the local labor laws of a foreign country. For example, even though your corporate personnel policies or codes of conduct may expressly prohibit a certain type of behavior, the legal system in another country may not consider that behavior sufficient to support a "for cause" termination of employment.

Prime examples are Germany and Italy, where employers do not necessarily have cause to fire employees who engage in sexual harassment, even if those employees violate company policy. Employers who terminate harassers may be forced to pay them termination indemnities.

In an effort to reconcile this situation, some employers may be tempted to blindly impose their own rules on foreign offices. But this method of harmonizing international HR policies will fail if the directive "to do it the American way" is based on the parochial view that "what works in Texas works everywhere else." Local foreign offices may view such imposition of HR policies as "headquarters imperialism."

Source: Gerald Maatman Jr.