With regard to the management of workplace conflict, you referred to sexual harassment, but be it same-gender harassment or simple bullying, it's unacceptable behaviour. One instance of it is one too many.
To manage it, in the first instance, would be to create a learning culture within the organization, with a positive knowledge base and an awareness. That would be the first step. If that can be built into the harassment awareness and the policy that will follow this legislation, it would go a long way toward creating the awareness that would serve to move our culture—and I'll use the word “culture” because that's what's commonly used—in a positive direction: managers well equipped with the knowledge, skills, and ability to recognize potentially harassing or insensitive behaviour and with the ability and the awareness to put a stop to it in the very first instance, as opposed to avoidance or delay or inaction. Inaction, in that regard, probably does as much harm as action. The issue must be dealt with up front.
You have to create that awareness, and you have to teach people to create learning opportunities so that they will actually take the management tools that they already have, that they're already empowered with, and use them.
