Luke watkeys, business manager
There are some things that are obviously inappropriate in the workplace. For (almost) all jobs, if you turn up to work in nothing but your birthday suit and a party hat and then proceed to scream blue murder at your fellow colleagues, you can expect (quite reasonably) that your boss will have something to say about it.
But we enter murky water when it’s not so clear cut. As people, we will all have different shades of perception on those things which are acceptable and those which are unacceptable. Your ‘aggressive’ may be other peoples’ ‘assertive’, and their ‘jokey’ may be someone else’s ‘offensive’. We’ve even had a retail client ask once if they were being fair in raising concerns to a member of staff who was openly destroying their stock (spoiler- from our perspective they were).
Enter the concept of reasonableness. As a team of HR professionals, we spend a lot of time helping organisations work out how fair or just it is to pursue a particular course of action. Anything that is considered unreasonable could leave an employer open to challenge, and this is something we unsurprisingly always like to avoid. So how do you achieve this mystical reasonableness?
But we enter murky water when it’s not so clear cut. As people, we will all have different shades of perception on those things which are acceptable and those which are unacceptable. Your ‘aggressive’ may be other peoples’ ‘assertive’, and their ‘jokey’ may be someone else’s ‘offensive’. We’ve even had a retail client ask once if they were being fair in raising concerns to a member of staff who was openly destroying their stock (spoiler- from our perspective they were).
Enter the concept of reasonableness. As a team of HR professionals, we spend a lot of time helping organisations work out how fair or just it is to pursue a particular course of action. Anything that is considered unreasonable could leave an employer open to challenge, and this is something we unsurprisingly always like to avoid. So how do you achieve this mystical reasonableness?
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