Employee Harassment and Discrimination
At Cataphora, we understand the importance of respecting employee privacy, which is why our objective monitoring solutions are intelligently designed to flag only instances where employees are committing meaningful infractions. Ultimately, it is in both your and your employees’ best interests to proactively monitor for the existence of employee harassment and discrimination and take action immediately to improve employee safety and reduce liability within your organization. Our solutions enable you to do just that.
Let’s consider a case of sexual harassment, which poses unique problems for an organization. Although keyword-based systems will enable you to perform a simple search for a set of inappropriate, sexually explicit words used in the electronic communications of a bad actor, the limitations of this method are tremendous:
- First of all, is this a problem that can be solved with keywords? You are trying to find out if you have an employee who is really harming the corporation, not just someone who is using dirty words in emails. If an organization defines a set of per se bad words and notifies employees that they’re not allowed to use them in the workplace, a bad actor can easily enough avoid these exact words and still manage to sexually harass an employee. However, the pattern of communications of the bad actor, as opposed to just the words, might uncover a very serious case of sexual harassment.
- Second, how do you define the set of keywords to search for? The keyword-based approach assumes you know the correct set of all encompassing keywords to search for to detect sexual harassment, for example. If the chosen keywords are incorrect, this method is completely flawed.
- Finally, how do you take context into account? Simplistic approaches fail to recognize the importance of context. For example, a book or movie script might use all kinds of “bad” phrases without posing any problem. Further, in the case of some type of real liability-generating actions, the scenario differs dramatically depending on who the bad actor is and ultimately, their role within the organization.
Simple solutions fail to address the complexity of an issue like sexual harassment and if performed in isolation, without using other complementary methods, will produce a significant number of false alerts. Given the nature of sexual harassment, the bad actor likely uses various corporate and personal communication channels to reach the victim, switches between them frequently and carefully refrains from using any sexually explicit keywords in an effort to avoid leaving a digital trail. Our solutions address these concerns and outperform other solutions by analyzing the whole context of the communications, the potential victim’s reactions, determining the actual actors’ roles and influence and then spotting repetitive patterns. These same methods can be applied to identify and eliminate employee discrimination in the workplace or other types of harassment, ultimately laying the foundation for a safer, non-discriminatory environment.
If sexual harassment or employee discrimination goes unnoticed within your organization, any number of bad things can result. For example, an employee lawsuit in the state of California costs the employer an average of $500,000, regardless of whether the company wins or loses. Other bad outcomes, including a damaged company reputation and damaged employee morale, will undoubtedly follow after a lawsuit of this type. By deploying our solutions, you will identify any potential clues about the existence of harassment or employee discrimination early on and address the issue before it escalates further, thus avoiding any bad outcomes. Our solutions – which utilize our patented, proven and context-aware technology – enable you to proactively address issues such as harassment and employee discrimination, reassuring your employees that your company takes employee protection seriously.
For additional information about HR solutions, please visit:
