What does the new Worker Protection Act mean for employers—and how can they move beyond compliance to create genuinely safer workplaces?
At the international HR Vision conference, Stephanie Reardon, CEO of LimeCulture, took the stage to explore these critical questions.
Ahead of her presentation, HR Vision organisers sat down with Stephanie for a Q&A session, where she shared her insights on how organisations can embed this new proactive duty into meaningful cultural change.
Read on to discover her key takeaways and how LimeCulture is helping businesses lead the way in creating safer cultures within workplace environments.
For more information about LimeCulture’s Safer Cultures work, including our training and consultancy initiatives, please visit the Safer Culture pages of our website or email info@limeculture.co.uk. We’d love to hear from you and help shape your organisation’s culture.
- The new Worker Protection Act introduces a duty to prevent sexual misconduct. In your view, what are the most significant legal and cultural implications for employers?
The Worker Protection Act marks a significant shift in the legal landscape regarding sexual harassment in the workplace, requiring employers to take reasonable steps to prevent employees from experiencing sexual harassment. Employment tribunals will have the authority to increase compensation for sexual harassment by up to 25% if an employer is found to have breached their duty.
This new legislation means it is more important than ever for organisations to take steps to ensure healthy and safer cultures in their workplaces and give employees the confidence to come forward, knowing they will be heard, supported, and their concerns acted upon appropriately.
However, compliance alone is not enough. Organisations must move beyond a tick-box approach and focus on meaningful cultural change. This involves embedding respect, accountability, and inclusivity at every level of the organisation.
- Many organisations see compliance as a checkbox exercise. How can HR leaders go beyond legal obligations to create meaningful cultural change?
We know from experience that organisations often struggle with sexual misconduct cases. We’ve frequently been told by organisations that they lack confidence when it comes to managing sexual misconduct cases – and quite understandably so. They are often highly emotive cases, that can significantly impact the lives of the those who are reporting, those who have been reported against, and the wider workforce – who will undoubtedly be observing how the organisation manages sensitive cases of this nature.
The need for organisations to take a trauma-informed approach to handling sexual misconduct cases is crucially important. Yet, we have seen multiple organisations respond to the new duty with a one-off training event (or even the sharing of a PowerPoint presentation) or the creation of a new policy (that hasn’t really been given much thought to how it can be implemented).
Instead, leaders need to embed the essence of this duty into a meaningful cultural shift within the organisation. Steps to achieve this include delivering regular and interactive training to your employees to raise awareness of what is acceptable behaviour (and, crucially, what is not), challenging inappropriate behaviours (where it is safe to do so), how to report concerns and importantly, promote how the organisation responds to concerns when raised including support provided and expectations around confidentiality. Training should be engaging, include scenario-based learning, that encourages discussion and understanding.
HR leaders should also ensure that there are clear reporting mechanisms in place. Employees must understand and trust the process by making it easy, confidential, and safe to report misconduct.
We also need to start holding leaders to account by setting clear expectations that misconduct will not be tolerated, at any level within the organisation. HR and other senior leaders need to lead by example, by modelling the behaviour they expect, promoting open conversations and reinforcing respect.
- What practical steps should organisations take to ensure they are not only compliant with the Act but are actively fostering a safe and respectful workplace?
I would recommend that all organisations should commission an external assessment to take a thorough look at their organisation and review its approach. This should include talking and listening to your employees and bringing an independent perspective to where you are and where you need to make improvements. Once you know this, you should take proactive steps to address the recommendations.
As a minimum, you need to create clear polices, that are accessible, practical, and enforced consistently. At LimeCulture we regularly see aspects of sexual misconduct spread across multiple policies and procedures, these are often confusing to navigate and provide the opportunity for cases to be mishandled.
There is also real value in investing in specialist training to equip key staff members across your organisation with the skills and knowledge to respond to reports of sexual misconduct consistently and safely. Without this, the risk is responses are inappropriate, create further trauma to the person making the report or could impact negatively on investigations (internally or through the criminal justice process) and decision making.
I also believe it’s important to monitor your workplace culture. Use employee surveys, forums and exit interviews to assess and improve the workplace culture. For example, if your organisation is not receiving any formal reports of sexual misconduct, then you should probably look at who is leaving your organisation and why this might be happening.
- Leadership commitment is crucial in shaping workplace culture. What should senior executives do to demonstrate their commitment to preventing misconduct?
The key thing that senior executives should provide is the ‘ownership’ of this issue. They need to reinforce that preventing misconduct is an organisational priority, not just an HR issue. Leadership should lead by example through demonstrating respectful behaviour in their own interactions and ensure their own leadership style actions align with company values. Leaders should also face real consequences if they fail to uphold workplace standards.
Ideally, though, leaders need to recognise this as an issue that requires their input from the highest level. They need to be the driver of this agenda; they should be allocating resources and ensuring staff are in place that are dedicated to the prevention and response initiatives. Without this buy-in at the most senior leadership level, we’ve seen initiatives will grind to a halt, despite the best efforts of those striving to implement culture change.
- You mention that organisations taking proactive steps may see an increase in reported incidents. How should companies handle this shift while maintaining trust and transparency?
Companies need to understand and acknowledge that an increase in reporting is ‘progress’. This feels counter intuitive, but it means that the more reports your company has, the more your employees trust you to respond to their concerns. Whereas, if your company has none or very few reports at present, our advice would be for you to interpret this as a lack of trust; it is likely that incidents are occurring, but they are just not being reported to you.
The organisation must act swiftly and fairly on all reports to demonstrate commitment to employee safety. You should also be transparent about how reports are handled and share insights on trends (without breaking confidentiality or identifying individuals involved). This will build trust amongst your employees, and they will recognise that you are doing your very best to ensure consistent responses.
It’s important to remember that employees will often be aware of cases and will be watching from the sidelines to see how cases are managed. So, it is important to be transparent about how your organisation handles reports.
Data insights should be used by your organisation to continuously improve. For example, through the identification of patterns, the organisation should adjust training, policies, or leadership practices accordingly.
- Based on your experience, what are the key barriers preventing organisations from fully addressing workplace sexual misconduct, and how can HR leaders overcome them?
In my experience, there are several key barriers that seem to be common to organisations across different sectors. These include:
- Fear of reputational damage – Companies avoid acknowledging issues to protect their image.
- Lack of leadership buy-in – Senior leaders minimise or ignore this issue if it does not directly affect them.
- Insufficient Risk Monitoring, Escalation & Oversight– Leaders often have no real knowledge or oversight of the level of risk they are holding within their organisation when it comes to sexual misconduct or consideration about what level of risk they are willing to tolerate.
- Cultural resistance – Some workplaces have deeply ingrained power dynamics that make change difficult.
- Ineffective reporting mechanisms – Where reporting is complex, slow, or leads to no action, employees will disengage and eventually leave your organisation.
I believe that HR can overcome these barriers by
- Ensuring leadership ownership and accountability –Include workplace culture in executive performance reviews.
- Communicate consistently – Regularly reinforce messages, policies, expectations of behaviour, and reporting mechanisms.
- Engage external experts for support – Bring in experts like LimeCulture to help or act as a sounding board.
- Use independent investigators – for high-profile or complex cases to maintain credibility and minimise potential negative impact on criminal justice process use experienced, external investigators.
- Ensure HR Advisers, Investigators and Panel Members are trauma-informed – ensure that your own staff understand trauma and its impacts on both the reporting and reported party.
- Raise Awareness amongst all employees – Train all employees on what appropriate and inappropriate behaviours are, bystander intervention and how to report internally (and externally).
- Provide Support to Employees – Train a cadre of staff to provide end to end support to employees; providing impartial information and advice about internal (and external processes) to assist in making informed decisions about next steps.
- How can HR teams collaborate more effectively with legal, compliance, and employee wellbeing functions to create a holistic approach to workplace safety?
It’s important to recognise that tackling sexual misconduct requires a whole-organisational response and therefore, it’ll be a good idea to establish cross organisational governance arrangements to make this a reality. Regular meetings between HR, legal, compliance, and wellbeing teams will need to come together to align strategies or processes.
You need to develop clear escalation processes that ensure all teams understand their roles and responsibilities when handling reports. Use data to continuously improve, such as using insights from HR surveys, legal case reviews, and wellbeing check-ins to refine policies and make improvements.
- How can HR leaders ensure that workplace policies on sexual misconduct also foster psychological safety, encouraging employees to speak up without fear of retaliation?
Make reporting safe and easy – Offer confidential and clear options to reporting. Make sure that key people within your organisation are trained to received disclosures safely and in so far as possible, make sure that their responses are consistent.
You should ensure that it is really clear to employees as to what they can expect if they do decide to make a report i.e., what will happen next, and when. So often, we hear employees saying they have no idea what would happen or who would handle that report, so as a consequence they would choose not to say anything at all and simply leave the organisation.
Ensure that end to end support is provided to the reporting and reported party, and make sure they are informed of the internal processes such as disciplinary procedures including investigation.
Finally, ensure transparency in outcomes wherever possible. While maintaining confidentiality, share insights on improvements that you’re making in response to reports or cases that have occurred as this will build trust and show you are trying to learn lessons to make improvements.
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