What Are 'All Reasonable Steps'? A Practical Guide for UK Employers
Everyone has the right to feel safe at work.
But not everyone does.
Almost half of us don't report workplace sexual harassment (Personio 2024).
People are worried about not being believed, about repercussions and seeing incidents being brushed aside.
Fear breeds silence, and silence breeds a toxic culture.
Ignoring this stuff isn't just bad ethically, it's bad for business.
❎ Employees leave: Talent walks out the door.
❎ Morale meltdown: Sickness goes up, productivity goes down.
❎ Reputation damage: Investors and customers vanish. Ouch.
❎ Costly court battles: Tribunals are expensive and messy.
The duty to take all reasonable steps is just round the corner.
That means as an employer you need to be prepared and feel confident to demonstrate you have taken all reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment. It’s not just about updating your policy. Read on to find out what you should be doing:
💠 Revisiting and updating your risk assessments: identify where harassment is most likely to happen and put plans in place to stop it. Use data to identify the risks, how these might show up and what measures you’ll take to eliminate or reduce the risk of it happening. Look at past incident data, use exit interview feedback, host listening groups and run anonymised surveys to gather employee insights into the culture, how safe they feel to report an incident and any patterns of behaviour that maybe falling under the radar. Remember employees are less likely to report there is an issue so we can’t rely on reported incidents alone.
🗣️ Communication is key: regular communication about your duty to prevent harassment. How are people supposed to know what's changed if you don't tell them? I’d hazard a guess that there are still many employees in your organisation who are not fully aware this duty exists so the more you build it into your regular communication channels the more people will be aware.
🗒️ Policy refresh: Develop or strengthen your anti-harassment policy and make sure it's actually useful. Easy to find, easy to understand, easy to use. The one thing I hear a lot when we carry out reviews of organisations’ HR policies and practices is their employees don’t know where to find the policy or know how to report an incident. Sometimes less is more.
📥 Clear reporting process: Make it crystal clear how people can report an incident. No confusion, no ambiguity. From the previous point, keep it simple. A flow chart or step by step guide what to do, who to speak to and how to escalate.
📈 Monitor and evaluate: Don't just set it and forget it. Check how your changes are working and tweak things as needed. This is a really important reasonable step. To demonstrate you are being proactive and taking reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment, you need to document it. measure it and review progress on a regular basis.
How confident are you that your organisation has done everything it can to protect its employees?
If the answer isn't a resounding "YES!", then we can help!
Send us an email and let's arrange a time to grab a cuppa and have a virtual chat: victoria@inclusion365.co.uk
