Harassment Letter to Employees

Behind every successful sexual harassment prevention initiative, there’s a strong marketing and communications plan. Unfortunately, too many organizations miss this point and instead rely on old, tired language when it comes to crafting a plan to identify and prevent misconduct that, if left unaddressed, could escalate to unlawful harassment.

While every organization must put processes in place to ensure legal compliance, the answer is to go beyond that floor and instead focus on the overall workplace climate. This harassment letter to employees template is one step to assist in that process and is designed to help support your communications plan by outlining the employer’s commitment to the employees and the desire to provide employees a great workplace culture.

This letter template provides sample language related to company leaders’ commitment to preventing workplace harassment and includes:

• A focus on trust. Experience and research prove that an issue that keeps companies from fully and effectively addressing workplace harassment is a lack of trust. This letter includes a fresh, new approach to developing or re-establishing trust with your employees.
• A genuine commitment to creating a culture that is healthy, inclusive and productive, as opposed to a culture that focuses exclusively on compliant.
• The ability to customize the template to make it your own. Whether it’s as simple as adding your logo or as complex as making this the first step to update your company’s mission statement, the sample language in this letter will prompt ideas on how to take steps to make yours a world-class organizational culture.

Consider using this template as the beginning of your culture transformation process. You can customize your efforts by including other topics in the letter, like:

• Early problem resolution through clear communication. This letter makes it clear that you’re committed to nipping workplace issues in the bud. This means you need to provide employees and managers alike a way to communicate in a non-combative and clear way.
• Complaint mechanisms. You can’t fix what you don’t know about. Use the language in this letter as a launching pad to update your mechanisms for employees to lodge complaints. And don’t just change the procedure, make it your goal to also infuse your new mechanism with the message, “we want to know when something is wrong so we can fix it.”
• Investigation process. The sample language in this letter should serve to help you revamp the way your organization looks into employee complaints. Remember that workplace investigations are your opportunity to uncover information that will help you make your workplace healthier.
• Fixing problems. In addition to overhauling how you look into employee complaints, the language in this template will help you think of creative and effective ways to fix misconduct in the event you find someone misbehaved at work.

While this letter is only one component of what should be your comprehensive plan to create a healthy culture, it’s a good start. Collectively, these steps add up to more than compliance— they will become vital elements of your organization’s plan to create and maintain a workplace culture where every employee feels he/she belongs and is valued.