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Putnam County Employment Lawyer Explains if Employers are Required to Train on Discrimination & Harassment

On Behalf of | Oct 3, 2016 | Uncategorized

As an experienced Putnam County Employment Lawyer, I often hear from employees who feel they were discriminated against. One common question they have is “Are employers required to train their employees on discrimination and harassment?” Employers are not required to give any specific type of training by law to it’s staff or to it’s categories of staff. For example you may want to train a new employee upon hiring on certain procedures that you have them carry out their job duties and responsibilities, that training would be different, for example; to a management person who would need to be trained on how to appropriately supervise or write a job performance evaluation or in determining how much to give as a bonus or an incentive payment to an employee that they supervise. The question always becomes how far that training should go and I recommend that employees give training to management level staff on topics of discrimination and harassment in the work place.

 

It goes a long way in preventing such claims from ever being filed against the company. Later on, that can be used in defense of an action should a claim be brought because you can show that you did have the intention on following the law. This will show that you did provide training to your management staff on this area, and that you did have a complaint procedure in place that employees were aware of. Employees failed to use that complaint procedure now that you have had the training that’s something that you can assert as a defense in a litigation that is brought against you. I highly recommend that everyone do training in terms of harassment and discrimination in the work place. It doesn’t have to be done every month, it certainly can be done every year or every two year basis, depending on what your staff turnover is and the size of your work force. It doesn’t have to be done one on one, it can be done in a group setting, and it typically takes only a couple of hours a day to maybe get one group in the morning, one group in the afternoon. It will cost less that way, as well as less disruption to the normal business activities that you engage in.

 

If you have any questions regarding discrimination or harassment in the workplace, please contact our skilled Putnam County Employment Lawyers for a free confidential consultation. Let our experience work for you.

This informational blog post was provided by Kim Berg, an experienced Putnam County Employment Lawyer.