How Culture Shift can help your organisation comply with the Worker Protection Act
Conduct a Thorough Risk Assessment
Actions for Employers:
- Evaluate potential harassment risks specific to your organisation’s size, industry, and work environment.
- Identify areas of vulnerability and potential improvement.
How Culture Shift Helps:
Culture Shifts analytics dashboard provides insights into reported incidents, helping organisations assess risk patterns and identify vulnerable areas. This data can help organisations understand the risk factors that contribute to workplace harassment and adjust their strategies accordingly.
Develop Comprehensive Anti-Harassment Policies
Actions for Employers:
- Clearly define what constitutes sexual harassment.
- Outline the process for reporting incidents.
- Establish clear consequences for policy violations.
How Culture Shift Helps:
While Culture Shift does not directly offer policy creation services, the Community of Practice (CoP) allows organisations to learn best practices and gain insights from peers when developing or updating anti-harassment policies. The community of practice is a group of people who share a common concern, set of problems, or an interest in a topic, who come together to fulfil both individual and common goals. Culture Shift provides our CoP with a series of events and spaces designed to offer mutual support in your endeavours to address culture-damaging behaviour. We facilitate both virtual and in-person events covering a range of topics from maximising the use of our product, improving case management skills and designing effective prevention-based initiatives.
Implement Robust Reporting Procedures
Actions for Employers:
- Provide multiple, accessible channels for reporting harassment.
- Ensure confidentiality and protection against retaliation.
- Consider implementing an anonymous reporting system.
How Culture Shift Helps:
Culture Shifts online reporting platform allows employees to report harassment both anonymously and with their names. This reduces barriers to reporting and ensures organisations have clear procedures for receiving and handling complaints.
Provide Effective Training Programmes
Actions for Employers:
- Offer regular, interactive training sessions for all employees.
- Address the complexities of modern workplace interactions.
- Include scenarios and practical strategies for prevention and intervention.
How Culture Shift Helps:
At Culture Shift we offer a growing collection of training courses and modules designed for both professional and organisational development. The Training Academy includes modules built to upskill your response team in addressing harassment prevention, responding to reports and effectively managing cases.
Foster a Culture of Respect and Accountability
Actions for Employers:
- Engage leadership in promoting a harassment-free workplace.
- Training specialist staff.
- Consistently enforce policies regardless of the perpetrator’s position.
How Culture Shift Helps:
By offering a platform for reporting and tracking incidents, Culture Shift encourages transparency and accountability. Our analytics dashboard allows leaders to monitor compliance and ensure that issues are consistently addressed, which is crucial for fostering a culture of respect.
Establish Clear Investigation Protocols
Actions for Employers:
- Develop a systematic approach to investigating all reported incidents.
- Ensure impartiality and thoroughness in all investigations.
- Communicate the process and outcomes clearly to all involved parties.
How Culture Shift Helps:
While Culture Shift doesn’t directly handle reports, our reporting platform and dashboard ensure that incidents are captured with all the data and information you need to consistently and thoroughly manage each case. By building your reporting process into the Culture Shifts Report + Support platform, using our fully editable reporting forms (allowing you to tailor the questions to align with your organisation) and having structured Service Level Agreements, you can define and uphold an effective case management process.
Regularly Review and Update Measures
Actions for Employers:
- Conduct periodic assessments of your prevention strategies.
- Stay informed about changes in legislation and best practices.
- Solicit feedback from employees on the effectiveness of current measures.
How Culture Shift Helps:
Culture Shift provides powerful and comprehensive analytics tools and future prevalence surveys. This is to help organisations monitor their anti-harassment efforts over time. Regular analysis of the data will enable employers to adjust their strategies and measure the effectiveness of existing policies and procedures.
Improve Communication
Actions for Employers:
- Regularly communicate the organisation’s commitment to preventing harassment.
- Provide clear, accessible information about policies and procedures.
- Create an open dialogue about workplace respect and safety.
How Culture Shift Helps:
Culture Shift helps to improve end to end communication within your organisation. Starting with our reporting platform, which facilitates better communication by providing a clear, accessible way for employees to report incidents and for management to track and respond to those reports.
Organisations can then communicate updates on intervention work and trends through the platform’s reporting features, which includes our Insight Report Builder. This feature allows you to share trends and analytics with internal and external audiences, demonstrating your ongoing understanding of your culture, and the work being done to transform it. It pulls data directly from your Culture Shift analytics dashboard to help you build a report that can be published directly to your reporting site.
We also provide resources such as campaigns and support articles, helping to communicate and increase awareness of your reporting process and overall culture management work.
Address Third-Party Harassment
Actions for Employers:
- While not explicitly required by the new Act, develop strategies to protect employees from harassment by clients, customers, or other third parties.
- Provide support and clear procedures for employees who experience third-party harassment.
How Culture Shift Helps:
Culture Shifts reporting platform can be used to track and respond to any cases that involve clients, customers, visitors or third parties. Our campaigns are suitable for both internal and external use. The public facing front-end system means that resources such as support articles can be viewed by all stakeholders, demonstrating your position on tackling harassment.
Document All Prevention Efforts
Actions for Employers:
- Maintain detailed records of all training, policies, investigations, and responses to incidents.
- This documentation can be crucial in demonstrating compliance with the new Act.
How Culture Shift Helps:
Our reporting platform and analytics dashboard automatically document all incidents, and responses to harassment. This ensures that organisations maintain a clear record of their compliance efforts. In addition, the front end of the site can be used to provide links to support articles, policies and procedures and all other prevention efforts.
