If I had to sum up discrimination using only one word, I would pick stereotypes. More often than not, workplace discrimination occurs when we make assumptions about others who are different than us – by race, religion, gender, or national origin, to name a few.
Instead of making a set of aspirational resolutions that have virtually no chance of being realized, view each day as an opportunity to be the you you want to be. Each new day is an opportunity. It's not something that only happens once a year, on January 1st. Each and every day presents us with the chance to, as the saying goes, "be the change you wish to see."
I get asked this question a lot when I do one-on-one sensitivity training sessions. These situations typically arise when a very valuable or very senior person (or both) engages in some kind of problematic behavior (e.g., inappropriate or unprofessional comments, bullying behavior, harassment). The employer wants to keep said employee but try to rehabilitate him or her.
It can be hard to articulate why a candidate isn't right for a particular job. Or why an employee is not the best pick for a certain assignment or promotion. But it can be really important for employers to identify legitimate, business related reasons for an individual's non-selection.
If you've been paying attention to legal compliance issues, you know that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has been a thorn in the side of many, many employers in the past few years. The following case is illustrative: Nick Aguirre was a car salesman in Arizona. He met with two managers and the dealership's [...]
A recent NLRB case stretched the limits of my credulity (and I've been pretty stretched out by the Board’s rulings the past couple of years). The case involves a Hooters franchise in California. An employee (we’ll call her Employee A) got in a verbal fight with another employee. Employee A hurled obscenities and got so [...]
Congresswoman Jackie Speier introduced a bill that would require harassment training for the House of Representatives earlier this week. It makes sense. After all, such training is already required for executive branch agencies. It’s critical too in the private sector; some states require it by statute. But even for those that don’t, it’s an essential part of [...]
There are certainly cases where an employer intentionally discriminates based on some kind of animus: racism, sexism, bias against a particular religion, etc. But there are also case where employers discriminate without any such intent. Alas, the discrimination is just as illegal. Take customer preference, as an example. A customer or client tells an employer [...]
The question assumes you provide training, at least for supervisory level employees, on how to comply with their various obligations under federal and state anti-discrimination laws. If you haven’t done so in the past couple of years, it’s time to roll out some training. The agencies and courts expect employers to have harassment and discrimination [...]
Workplace investigations are often, by their very nature, disruptive to business as usual. An employee has likely lodged some kind of serious complaint. Depending on the nature of the allegations and the person(s) against whom they are levied, an external investigator (such as myself) might have been retained. This kind of scenario almost always sets [...]
