Many of us in India are still grappling with the new arrangement of Work from Home. Most managements begin to see its benefits of saving time and cost to the organization.

So, is it here to last? 

We never know, it might become more common and an acceptable norm among many organizations across the country.

We can confidently say WFH is the new emerging “workplace”.

As WFH has had a strong impact in the way of work, it’s worth having a closer look at its ramifications with respect to the POSH Act.

For that we need to primarily understand two aspects:

“Workplace” & “The way of work”

According to the Prevention Of sexual harassment Act, “workplace” includes “A dwelling place or a house” making it clear that the Act applies to everybody who is working from their own home, leased/rented home, a company leased home, or any other form of accommodation. From wherever work or conduct official business, it becomes their “workplace”. 

Unlike others, this workplace has its challenges with regards to stipulated working hours and of course, constant overlapping of professional and personal time.

Undoubtedly, not everyone can work from home. For those who can, the Way of Work will change significantly impacting all areas of work.

From the POSH perspective, especially in today’s situation, it is important to look at facts and circumstances in each case to determine whether an alleged incident took place in a workplace or not. Thus, be aware that posting any unwelcome sexual comments or any such acts even while working from home is considered a ‘workplace incident’ and liable to disciplinary action.  

Let’s take a peek into some pointers while working from home with respect to The Prevention of Sexual Harassment Act. in this context.

It is important to restrain from:

• Sending personal and inappropriate messages
• Sexual jokes/forwards/videos/drawings/pics
• Sexual descriptions over telephone or video conferencing
• Continuous idle chatter over phone which is of sexual nature
• Unwelcome remarks while communicating
• Digital stalking (stalking in all forms of social media)
• Lewd gossips on colleagues about sexual affairs/sexual orientation/preferences/virginity
• Vulgar humour or language while communicating 
• Relentless proposals for physical intimacy
• Encroaching personal space by asking inappropriate questions
• Passing Sexual comments on weight, body shape, size, or figure

This list doesn’t end here. It is certainly the Managements’ priority and duty to ensure safe and secure workplaces by implementing the following:

• know that they are subject to same rules on prevention of sexual harassment in virtual world as they are in real world.
• take reasonable steps to prevent and respond to the risk of sexual harassment.
• Conduct POSH e-learning and POSH awareness sessions on POSH
• Share POSH posters with employees on responsible usage of office resources during lock down.
• provide clear guidance to employees on how to use technology and social media responsibly.

Let’s create a safer workplace, even at home. 

The post Work From Home a “workplace”? POSH act talks first appeared on Metis POSH Consulting Service LLP.

Harvey Weinstein incident was one of the most high profile cases of Sexual harassment in recent times. #MeToo campaign was an eye opener in terms of the degree of sexual harassment at workplace. Women from all over the world came out and described their horrific tales of sexual exploitation.

I came across this data on trends in reported instances of sexual harassment across India’s top 100 companies where companies were asked to report the number of women employees and the number of cases of sexual harassment charges made by them since 2013. Please find below an interesting analysis of the same.

For the below analysis, only 52 of these firms for which consistent data is available for the past five financial years (from fiscal 2013 to fiscal 2017) were taken.

The data shows the number of reported instances of harassment has risen over the years.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that the incidence of sexual harassment at workplace has increased. It could also be that the ratio of the number of harassment cases to the number of women employees on company payrolls has also gone up.

It is a fact that majority of the sexual harassment cases are not reported. The latest survey by INBA also shows that out of all the victims of sexual harassment who responded, 70% of them did not report to the management/internal complaints committee. The reasons were due to fear of retaliation, subsequent repercussions and none the less sympathy with the offender due to past mutual understanding.

Hence the data above showing increase in the proportion of sexual harassment cases could be an outcome of greater level of awareness of mechanisms available internally which is a good sign.

There is a visible trend in companies reporting cases of sexual harassment at workplace over the years showing that companies are realizing the importance and need to have an effective mechanism internally.

In my experience, the companies are also warming up to the fact that they need to go beyond compliance.  They are looking at building a culture of safe environment by involving all employees. The thrust has to be come from the top management and slowly percolated to the rest of the workforce to ensure buy-ins from the entire community of employees.

The report below shows that in services such as IT and Banking, largest number of sexual harassment has been reported. This is true even among the top 30 companies, which are a part of the BSE Sensex universe.

While data for several of the Sensex firms is missing for previous years, all of these firms reported the number of sexual harassment cases for the past fiscal year.

Banks and IT firms lead among Sensex firms when it comes to reporting sexual harassment.

What is important to note here is that the absolute numbers may not be the true or may be misleading since it is a fact that large number of women employees are employed with service sectors. When we normalize it with the number of women employees, Auto and Infrastructure firms rank higher in terms of reported cases of sexual harassment.

There is data to show that larger firms tend to report more than smaller firms. The report also suggests that when the companies were divided into four groups based on their market capitalization, the groups with higher market capitalization had higher cases of sexual harassment.

This also means that since larger firms have more at stake, they tend to be more serious in ensuring there are reliable mechanisms to deal with sexual harassment cases internally and they take care to create awareness amongst employees.

However, there have been few exceptions where in few large IT companies have reported zero instances of sexual harassment over the past fiscal year.

I read an interesting article about a study conducted by Girija Borker, an economist with Brown University. Her analysis says that compared to men, women make poorer economic choices owing to fear of harassment. If women were to choose between safety and financial stability, they chose the former and hence there is lower women workforce participation. This if not addressed by the companies, will affect India’s productivity and economic growth.

What is good to note is that India is gearing up to address the above issues. As an external consultant, I definitely see a positive trend in companies trying to set up committees, get them trained, conduct awareness sessions across company and also handle issues with utmost urgency. This is no longer only a HR initiative. It has to be driven down by the top management. Committee owns the entire responsibility of running the show. Management has to ensure that they contribute positively towards building a culture of  a safe working.

The post An overview of Sexual Harassment at Workplace first appeared on Metis POSH Consulting Service LLP.