When Harassment Shows Up at Work

For cleaning and restoration business owners, workplace harassment ranks among the most complicated human resources (HR) challenges they face.

Employees often work overnight, operate in small crews, and report to front-line supervisors while spending much of their time at customer locations rather than inside the company’s own facility.

Meanwhile, the legal landscape keeps shifting, leaving many owners unsure of what they should be doing now—not after an employee walks into the office with a serious complaint or as the target of one.

Scott Tackett, senior business advisor and director of organizational development at Violand Management Associates, has spent years helping contractors build the policies, training and reporting procedures that prevent problems, guide a proper response when something happens, and keep a difficult situation from becoming much bigger.

Start with the handbook, not a hunch

Walking into a cleaning or restoration company to assess its exposure to harassment and discrimination claims, Tackett said he looks at several specific things.

First is the handbook itself: an actual anti-harassment and discrimination policy, not one pulled off the internet years ago and never updated, since the rules keep changing quickly.

Next is the reporting channel. A generic policy that tells employees to report problems to their supervisor breaks down fast if the supervisor is the one doing the harassing, he said. Employees need another way in—HR, an email address, the owner’s cell number, or a third-party service.

Training records come next, and Tackett distinguishes between a supervisor who once read the handbook and one who has gone through specific, documented training. State requirements vary, he noted, so owners need to know both the federal rules and whatever their state mandates.

He also asks for a complaint history. A clean log with nothing in it is not necessarily good news. “Usually that means that people aren’t reporting, not that nothing is necessarily happening,” Tackett said.

Two less obvious checks round out his list: how much contact a remote employee has with company management versus client staff, and turnover data at specific sites, which he said can be an early warning sign.

Summed up, the red flags are a missing or copy-pasted policy, a single reporting channel that runs through the potential problem, no documented training, an owner who describes the culture as “like a family,” and leadership that cannot walk through, step by step, what would happen if a complaint came in tomorrow.

Liability doesn’t stop at the office door

Because cleaning and restoration crews frequently work at client sites, sometimes overnight and with limited oversight, Tackett said many owners misunderstand where their responsibility ends. It doesn’t stop at the company’s own walls. Employers can be held liable for harassment by non-employees—a customer, a client’s staff, even a stranger on the premises—if the company knew or should have known and failed to act. That means the policy has to cover harassment from anyone, including a client employee or a third party such as a delivery person on-site.

Training cannot be a one-time event, either. Tackett recommends it happen every year, with clear, repeated instructions for what to do in the moment: leave the area if it is safe to do so, contact a specific named person, and document what happened. Employees should have a name and a number they can call at 2 a.m., and client sites should have their own advance protocol for who gets notified. Employees also need to hear, explicitly, that they will not be penalized for leaving a site early or refusing to keep working in an unsafe situation.

When a complaint comes in

If an employee brings a harassment complaint tomorrow morning, Tackett said the process starts with the policy itself: whoever is designated to receive it, ideally someone other than the complainant’s direct supervisor with actual authority to act. That could be an owner, an office manager, or a designated compliance contact, if everyone understands complaints must be escalated immediately, even informal ones. Documentation comes next—date, time and the specific words used, however uncomfortable, along with names of anyone involved, witnesses, and where and when it happened.

Tackett said he has long asked complainants to write their own account in their own words, without coaching on content or style, and to avoid summarizing or editorializing at that stage. “Let’s get the facts down,” he said. Investigations need an impartial party outside the accused’s chain of command, which in a small company may mean bringing in an outside HR consultant or attorney rather than an owner with a personal relationship to the accused. And the clock matters: starting immediately shows the complaint was taken seriously, Tackett said, while delay increases legal exposure and signals to the complainant that it wasn’t.

Were cases are won and lost

Changing a complainant’s schedule, assignments, pay or treatment after a complaint—even with good intentions, such as moving someone to a different site without their input—can be framed as retaliation, Tackett said. So can a cold shoulder from coworkers, exclusion or simply going silent after the investigation closes. “Silence could read as indifference,” he said. Keeping the complainant and the accused apart during the investigation matters too, as does consistent discipline; finding merit in a complaint and taking no visible action, or acting without a fair process, both invite scrutiny.

Retaliation claims are often easier for a plaintiff to prove than the underlying harassment claim, Tackett noted, because the timeline and the adverse action are usually well documented. He described a case in which a company investigated a complaint but minimized it with the complainant and moved her to another position without her involvement. The underlying harassment was never proven, but the retaliation claim succeeded anyway.

What if there are no complaints?

Tackett, who has appeared before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, said owners who assume a clean complaint history means they are in the clear are often reading the data wrong, especially in an industry where the work site isn’t always visible the way a factory floor or an office would be.

“No complaints often means employees don’t trust the process,” he said. “They don’t know who to tell, or they don’t believe anything will change.” He recommends testing that assumption with anonymous surveys, exit interviews, and conversations with site employees before concluding everything is fine.

Asked for the one sentence he never wants to hear an owner or manager say after an employee brings them a harassment complaint, Tackett didn’t hesitate: “Are you sure that’s what happened?”

Watch the complete interview with Scott Tackett or listen to the podcast below: