Okay, so the Social Committee wants to include in a raffled gift basket a gift certificate to the local sex shop. When you express your discomfort to your fellow supervisors, they say that natural checks and balances will ensure that no one is offended: first, people are free to refrain from purchasing tickets in the first place and second, the winner is totally free to discard of the certificate or give it to another team member who may enjoy it.
Are the supervisors right?
Well, not really. The workplace is required to uphold standards of conduct that allow all employees to feel comfortable. When a situation can reasonably be pre-assessed as potentially excluding, offensive or humiliating, it is the employer’s responsibility to remove that obstacle. It is not up to the employee to do that! The employee should be expected to take personal action to stop problematic behaviour only in those instances where the employer (i.e. management) did not anticipate the sticky situation or was not physically there when it happened.
So what does this mean vis-Ã -vis the sex-shop gift certificate? Well, it’s quite simple. Since the supervisory team reasonably anticipates that someone may feel uncomfortable or even offended by this certificate, it is their job to ensure that no employee is put in that position. Anything less that that means that management had abdicated its responsibility and left employees to fend for themselves in a situation where the organization was obligated to protect them.
Next time we’ll examine a controversial question: would any of our answers to the sex-store dilemma change depending on the type of organization and culture?
