In part 1 of this series I invited you to consider how you as a supervisor would handle a situation where your team’s Social Committee decided to include a gift certificate to a nearby sex store in a basket that was to be raffled amongst team members (the proceeds of which would support community causes).
I try to keep these blog entries as short as I can. Therefore, I’ll answer each of the questions I posed last time separately. Here’s the first one:
Is there anything wrong with including the gift certificate in the package?
One great way for analyzing any sticky respect-related situation is to ask the following: “Can we post a banner quoting the comment or run a video of the action in question above our main entrance”? If yes, no problem. If not, sorry, it’s gotta go.
The raffling of a sex-store gift is not congruent with current notions of what constitutes `professionalism’ in the workplace. It is unprofessional. To take it a step further, in some organizations (particularly in those with significant ethnic and religious diversity) there’s a high likelihood that someone would sincerely experience this gift-basket as `offensive’; it would then readily qualify as harassment.
My position? let’s not get caught up in hairsplitting definitions. The bottom line is this: can you or can you not post a copy of the sex-certificate above your main entrance?
Well, if you’re running a strip-club, you can probably safely post it right above the entrance. If your establishment is not part of the sex industry, you probably can’t.
Therefore, sorry, the gift certificate’s gotta go.
Stay tuned for the next answer!