What is the role of a Human Resources department?

Sharon T. Ray (sharon.ray@sthompsonassociates.com) is CEO at S. Thompson & Associates in Chicago, IL, and Ted Banks (tbanks@scharfbanks.com) is Partner at Scharf Banks Marmor LLC in Chicago, IL.

The media coverage over the last several months has highlighted the issues around reporting sexual harassment misconduct. Every company and industry is different, of course, so it may be misleading to try to generalize the factors that allowed this conduct to continue. But there are certainly some questions that should be asked. Were the problems due to a management culture that put profits above all else? Could it be due to the lack of a credible system to report wrongdoing without fear of retaliation? Could it have been due to a pervasive societal bias that has tolerated this conduct? Could it have been due to an HR department that viewed its job as protecting management, no matter what the cost to individuals or the long-term cost to the company? Most likely, some or all of these factors played a part.

A common element in most of the reported cases is a failure to act by an organization’s HR department. Every experienced compliance officer knows that one of the key determinants of whether you have a successful compliance and ethics program is whether you have a good working relationship with the company’s HR department. Your HR colleagues can support a number of the processes, such as hiring employees who have no propensity to violate the law, communicating the importance of compliance and ethics as a key company value at new employee orientation, making certain that compliance training is delivered to the appropriate employees based on their roles, enforcing a system of incentives and punishments for compliance violations, and making certain that allegations of wrongdoing are fairly investigated without fear of (or actual) retaliation. The growing number of women coming forward with reports of sexual abuse in the workplace made it fairly obvious that in the companies where this conduct was allowed to persist, the HR department was not at the forefront of trying to protect employees from abuse.

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