Is Your Organization at Risk of Being Too Politically Correct?

There’s little debate over whether organizations should have policies against harassment and other misconduct at the workplace. But can these rules go too far and actually put an organization at greater risk?

That’s the question being posed by James McDonald, SPHR, managing partner at Fisher Phillips, an employment law firm in California.

McDonald will speak on June 19 at the Society for Human Resource Management Annual Conference and Exposition, in a presentation titled, “Political Correctness at Work: How Much is Too Much”

In McDonald’s view, HR leaders should be wary of crafting anti-harassment policies with the most hypersensitive employees in mind. Overly broad policies, especially those not guided by legal standards, can open up an organization to a flurry of complaints.

“It’s important that policies that aren’t calibrated so finely that the policies impose an extreme version of political correctness,” McDonald says.

Anti-harassment policies have received new attention in the last year or so after high-profile cases involving Hollywood personalities, political figures, news anchors and others. McDonald says he has not observed an increase of harassment complaints at most offices. But he warns against overly strict policies installed at many universities, which have imposed strict speech codes, “safe spaces” and warnings against “microaggressions.”

Microaggressions are generally viewed as casual degradations of marginalized groups. Examples include asking a person of Latin American descent why they don’t have an accent or assuming that an African-American person may listen to a certain kind of music. But these comments are open to interpretation and perpetrators are often well meaning. Thus, it begs the question as to whether policies can be easily crafted against them.

“You can teach people not to use racial slurs. It’s difficult to teach someone not to use microaggressions,” McDonald says. “To impose the kind of burden on employers that many universities have imposed upon themselves is just not workable.”

His advice is quite simple: follow the law. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits harassment and discrimination against workers based on sex, race, color, national origin or religion. Other state and federal laws also list people over 40, the disabled, and members of the LGBT community as protected classes. 

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says employee conduct should be evaluated from the standpoint of how a “reasonable person” would perceive it. That’s a somewhat fuzzy guideline, but does suggest that organizations are not obligated to protect the feelings of the most sensitive workers.

McDonald notes that so-called “zero tolerance” policies against harassment are impractical at workplaces where work must be done and goals met.

“To say we have zero tolerance for all forms of harassment might sound good on the outset but it opens organizations up to complaints about all kinds of things,” he says. “By making the policy too strong and too broad, it creates a situation where it could backfire.”

McDonald advises workplaces to train managers on proper workplace conduct, so that they will set the example to be followed by employees. He also says it’s best to warn workers against situations that could lead to harassment, such as after-work social gatherings with alcohol.

“If you train managers how to behave and train them to be role models and train them on common sense issues, you’re going to eliminate a lot of the real problems,” he says.

James McDonald, SPHR, will speak Tuesday, June 19 from 10:45 a.m. to 12 p.m. at the SHRM 2018 Annual Conference and Exposition.