Preserving staff dignity statement

Our preserving staff dignity statement is essentially a stand-alone policy for you to give to third parties with whom you do business setting out your zero-tolerance approach to aggressive behaviour, violence, bullying and harassment towards your staff. This all helps ensure you’re providing them with a safe place to work and could assist with your defence to certain legal claims.

Legal provisions

There are several avenues of legal redress which an employee could potentially use if subjected to conduct that would count as third party aggressive behaviour, violence, bullying or harassment, for example:

• a constructive dismissal claim, where you’ve breached the implied term of mutual trust and confidence by failing to take steps to protect them
• a personal injury claim, where injury has been suffered by the employee as a result and you’ve failed in your duty to take reasonable steps to ensure their health and safety and to protect them from reasonably foreseeable risks
• unlawful harassment, if the reason for your failing to take any action to deal with the problem is itself related to a protected characteristic covered by discrimination law (sex, race, age, etc.).

In addition, you’re under a positive duty to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment of your employees in the course of their employment, which means you need to be proactive and put a range of measures in place to try and stop sexual harassment from happening in your workplace in the first place, and this includes sexual harassment that may be committed by third parties. So, it pays to spell out from the outset what standards of behaviour you expect from third parties with whom you have business dealings - this includes customers, clients, contractors and suppliers.

Options

There are a number of ways you can do this. For example, you could display visible signs in the workplace about unacceptable behaviour and your zero-tolerance approach to harassment, you could put a paragraph on the back of visitors’ passes, and/or you could put something in email footers or on your company website. One of the best ways to get your message across though is to issue a statement to third parties setting out your “rules” and it’s useful to do this at the outset of entering into a business relationship with them when you’re agreeing contractual terms. Use our Preserving Staff Dignity Statement here. This will work with contractors, suppliers and regular clients but obviously won’t work in industries where you have hundreds of one-off non-business customers, such as in retail and hospitality - with those, workplace signs will be the better option.