“That” was discriminatory?

How many times have we heard “that” question, which is not really a question at all.

Many companies have instituted written policies against discrimination, but do executives, management, and even co-workers understand what discrimination looks like in the workplace?

“Discrimination” is a broad term, capturing many sub-topics, including discrimination by age, disability, ethnicity, gender, genetics, and religion.  It can occur in all aspects of the workplace, from the job posting to resume review to applicant selection for an interview, all the way through lay-offs and even reinstatement.  Perhaps the simple way to think about discrimination is to view it as anything less than equal treatment of all workers at all times.

Because the reach of a discrimination claim is so all-encompassing of the workplace, there’s a great benefit to outsourcing your hotline to a third party vendor.  Being that one step removed from the literal workplace can make all the difference in how the telephone call or website submission will be received, tabulated, and reported back to the company.

When a hotline is managed in-house, a company risks that the same break in company expectations that allowed the discrimination will inhibit a robust complaint response.  An internal recipient might discount that the employees in a particular section are high-spirited and think that documentation of a complaint against a co-worker would be disloyal.  Or, in another scenario, a manager of a division might minimize the level of seriousness of a complaint and fail to accurately record and report complaint statistics to upper management.

Hotline providers like Ethical Advocate bring not only a high level of expertise in the field of complaint hotline management, but also a primary dedication to accurate collection, documentation, aggregation, and client reporting.  Our singular focus is to compile and deliver the kind of information that companies need to consider the possibility that a discriminatory circumstance has occurred or a discriminatory practice is in motion.

It’s also true that when you bring in a trusted third party vendor like Ethical Advocate to provide your anonymous company hotline, you acquire a partner that is highly trained for interactions with persons who are reporting.  We stay up-to-date on all aspects of laws, regulations, and court rulings that can impact the issue of discrimination.  An ethics hotline will help your company avoid or minimize the impact of a government audit and investigation findings that your company’s approach was outdated or failed to embrace the current letter of the law.