Imagine you’re the HR Manager, and you’re walking into the office one morning. After settling in, you notice an envelope placed covertly on your desk. It is addressed to you. Inside, you find a letter from an employee about an unpleasant incident they faced, during the CTO’s birthday dinner party last week. The writer has taken the name of the employee who caused this incident and two other employees who were present at the time as witnesses. However, the writer hasn’t left their name on the letter, or any other details about which team or department they work in.
The letter includes actions such as “constantly staring at me”, “gesturing to his colleagues in my direction”, “asking me how I was doing multiple times”, “attention made me uncomfortable”. Just for the sake of caution, you check the company PoSH policy and realised that the incidents are covered as sexual harassment.
Ordinarily, you would have forwarded any PoSH complaint that came to you to the Internal Committee (IC) for them to handle. However, this is the first time you’ve come across an anonymous complaint.
As an HR manager, what do I do next?
Even in a situation like this, the IC is the appropriate point of contact to address this issue. You can forward the complaint document to them, explaining how you found it. They might require you to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) to maintain confidentiality. This is because even though the complainant is anonymous, you have knowledge of the respondent, the details of the incident, and potential witnesses.
As per Section 9 and Section 11 of the PoSH law, the IC can take up a complaint when the complainant has written a formal complaint identifying the respondent. By this interpretation, complaints submitted anonymously cannot be addressed.
Inevitably, as part of the PoSH process, the IC will communicate closely with both the complainant and the respondent. This is because the IC needs to understand more about the complaint and gather facts. They might want to suggest evidence or summon witnesses. Legally speaking, the IC needs to take consent from the complainant on whether to and how to address the sexual harassment they may have experienced. They are also legally mandated to share the complaint with the respondent, including who has complained against them, to enable the respondent to draft an appropriate response and represent themselves adequately.
Therefore, in the absence of a complainant, the IC has no grounds to address the issue. Unfortunately, therefore, the IC will not be able to take up this issue because it is an anonymous complaint.
But as an HR manager, shouldn’t I do something?
It’s understandable that as someone with knowledge of a potential case of sexual harassment, you would want to take some action. However, the matter needs to be approached sensitively. While it is possible that the incident described in the letter took place, it is still one side of the story.
The IC is also aware of how to overcome biases that may arise when handling such issues. These biases include assuming complaints are false or motivated, or assuming it is a case of harassment which the complainant is filing as a PoSH complaint because it hasn’t been taken seriously. The IC is trained to overcome such biases, so they can come to a fair and reasoned conclusion.
Sexual harassment is a complex issue, laced with nuances and cultural undertones. There is almost always more to the first description of an incident. The IC is specially trained to help both the complainant and the respondent identify and share important details that they may have missed or overlooked the first time. This is a crucial aspect of the inquiry that the IC can’t do if the complaint is filed anonymously.
Keeping this in mind, as an HR, is there something I can do?
It’s likely that the employee who has written the letter hasn’t come forward because they are afraid of retaliation, or not being taken seriously. This is not uncommon. Consider this as an opportunity to build trust and empathy into your work culture. Here are a few strategies you can employ:
- Ask managers and leadership to drop a line during all-hands and team meetings encouraging employees to come forward to the IC in case they feel uncomfortable by something that happened at work
- Screen gender-positive films, or invite a gender and safety expert for a talk as part of employee engagement
- Revise your mandatory PoSH training for employees to include case studies of different kinds of sexual harassment, especially the subtle types such as those mentioned earlier in this article
- Put up posters with IC’s contact details in common areas in your office, and request the Members to email them to all employees
- Do a security audit to check if all CCTV cameras are working, and let employees know once it’s complete