Anthea Lowe &
Associates
Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO), Diversity, Discrimination Prevention,
Bullying and Harassment Prevention, and Grievance Management
An Australian Workplace Consultancy
** Tip of the month
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How I can help you
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** Tip of the month
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My experience,
skills and achievements
Are you as well protected as you should be?
Are you a good people manager or supervisor?
Contact Information
How I can help you
Group and ‘one on one’ practical, dynamic, interactive,
and customised, skills-based training and coaching programs – for all levels of management and
staff – in any Australian State or Territory - on:
Bullying
and harassment prevention
Diversity,
equal employment opportunity and discrimination prevention, and/or effective,
fair and non-discriminatory decision-making – recruitment and selection, team
management and/or separation
Grievance
management – for contact officers and grievance resolvers
Effective,
fair and non-discriminatory customer service, and
Similar topics.
Conference
and seminar workshops and presentations – in any
Grievance investigations and resolutions
Development
and writing of tailor-made, ‘best practice’, practical policies and procedures – on diversity, equal employment
opportunity (EEO) and discrimination prevention; bullying and harassment
prevention; fair and non-discriminatory service delivery; grievance management;
counselling and discipline; and other similar topics.
Development
and writing of customised, skills-based training packages and associated train
the trainer programs
for your trainers – on the same or similar topics.
Advice,
‘expert opinions’ and practical assistance in
relation to promoting diversity and EEO; preventing discrimination, bullying
and harassment; grievance management; and similar topics.
Facilitation of staff consultations, planning and
similar meetings.
My experience, skills and achievements
Anthea
Lowe has a 25 year record of achievements in equal opportunity and people
management in both
She established her workplace consultancy in early 2001. Since then
she has worked for almost 90 different organisations throughout
She has:
Conducted practical training
programs, workshops and conference presentations - in bullying and harassment
prevention; diversity, EEO and non-discriminatory decision-making; fair and
non-discriminatory service delivery; and grievance management - for senior
executives; partners; human resources managers; other line managers;
non-supervisory staff; contact officers; and union delegates.
Worked with senior managers
as an independent investigator and/or facilitator to resolve complex and/or
serious workplace grievances.
Written tailor-made,
‘best practice’, practical policies and procedures – on EEO and discrimination
prevention; bullying and harassment prevention; fair and non-discriminatory
service delivery (including writing the first edition of the ‘Equal Treatment
before the Law Bench Book’ for NSW judicial officers, which won an Australiasian Insititute for
Judicial Administration award for excellence – see http://www.jc.nsw.gov.au/benchbks/equality/);
grievance handling; and counselling and discipline.
Provided detailed
comments on how to improve EEO-related policies and procedures and associated training modules.
Provided expert
witness opinions for lawyers - in relation to negligence claims for alleged
workplace bullying and harassment.
Run a series of
staff focus groups on the perceived nature and extent of workplace bullying and
harassment by employees, customers and others, and then produced an extensive,
written report including a set of practical recommendations – every one of
which the particular client implemented.
Advised HR and other
senior managers on, for example, how best to reasonably accommodate the needs
of particular employees; how best to prevent bullying and harassment; how to
ensure their line managers are able and willing to prevent discrimination, take
non-discriminatory decisions and intervene appropriately in potentially unfair,
bullying and/or harassing situations; how to design effective and fair
grievance management systems; how to handle a particular grievance or potential
grievance.
Produced customised, skills-based EEO and bullying/harassment
prevention training packages for use by internal trainers, and conducted
associated train the trainer programs.
Run awareness and practical behaviour modification sessions for
individuals found to have been involved in discrimination, harassment or
bullying to help ensure they do not re-offend.
Conducted or provided advice
on EEO-related staff consultations and surveys.
Helped an under-functioning
team to resolve interpersonal and work conflict issues.
Facilitated complex
restructuring and planning meetings.
Anthea would be delighted to supply you with referees for any of the
above.
In June 2001, Anthea wrote, published
and marketed the first, practical set of guidelines for Australian employers on
the prevention of workplace bullying and harassment. These have been used by organisations
throughout
Following the
publication of these guidelines, Anthea
was commissioned to write the harassment and bullying prevention chapter in the
first three editions of CCH’s Australian Master
Human Resources Guide (2002, 2003 and 2004/05) and the bullying prevention
chapter in the fourth, fifth (2006 & 2007) and upcoming sixth (2008)
editions.
Anthea is a non-judicial member of the Equal Opportunity Division of the
NSW Administrative Decisions Tribunal which means that she regularly hears and
decides cases of discrimination and harassment that have not been able to be
settled by the Anti-Discrimination Board of NSW. She is a member of both the NSW Equal
Employment Opportunity Practitioners’ Association and the Australian Human
Resources Institute.
Before establishing her consultancy, Anthea was the Manager, Education
Services at the Anti-Discrimination Board of NSW. There, Anthea was regarded as a dynamic and
inspirational people manager and leader.
She expanded her team from 4 to almost 20, by, among other things,
initiating and developing a highly successful commercial unit providing
EEO-related consultancy, training and publications for all sectors.
Anthea wrote most of the Board’s practical, ‘plain English’
publications. The workplace guidelines series she wrote received an excellent
review in HR Monthly, March 1999 and was also commercially licensed to
the Equal Opportunity Commission, Victoria.
Frequently requested as a dynamic presenter by EEO and HR conference
organisers, Anthea developed and then managed the training programs still used
by the Board, and conducted and managed longer-term consultancy projects for
both private and public sector clients.
Before working at the Board, Anthea researched and wrote a series of
publications for the NSW Cancer Council; and spent 2 years developing the
Immigration Advice and Rights Community Legal Centre.
For several years in
Are you as well protected as you should be?
There
are many
Equal
opportunity/anti-discrimination
Industrial/workplace
relations
Occupational
health and safety and workers’ compensation
Criminal
Common
– for example, negligence claims.
Under
each of these categories of law, the general rule is that your
organisation/employer will be legally liable for any discrimination, harassment
or bullying that is committed by any employee (and, of course, that breaks any
one or more of these laws) – UNLESS your organisation/employer has taken “all
reasonable steps”, and/or done everything “reasonably practicable”, to:
Prevent
the discrimination, harassment, or bullying from happening in the first place, and
Resolve,
fairly and appropriately, any alleged discrimination, harassment or bullying
that is suspected or known by any line manager, grievance adviser or grievance
resolver.
Checklist for senior managers, HR managers and employers - © Anthea Lowe
& Associates
These
days, Australian courts, tribunals and commissions are saying that - at an
absolute minimum – you MUST:
1.
Have
clear, written policies and procedures that explain precisely what you expect
of your employees in relation to both their decision-making, and their
behaviour towards each other and your customers or clients.
Do
you have an adequate EEO (and/or diversity) and discrimination risk prevention
policy and an adequate bullying and harassment risk prevention policy?
Do
these policies list the particular and more onerous responsibilities of your
line managers?
Does
your bullying and harassment policy include electronic bullying and
harassment?
And
does it cover bullying adequately, and provide at least as much bullying
prevention guidance as it provides about harassment prevention?
Do
both these policies adequately cover your employees’ relationships with your
customers, clients and with anyone else employees have to interact with in the course
of their work – including when at work functions off-site or out of hours and
when on work business overnight?
2.
Have
a clear, written, trusted, fair and followed grievance procedure, backed by a
fair, appropriate and followed counselling and discipline procedure.
Do
your grievance and counselling and discipline procedures contain sufficient
step-by-step detail and guidance to encourage trust in their use?
Are
there sufficient routes through your grievance procedure to encourage people to
come forward?
Do
your procedures follow the rules of ‘procedural fairness’?
Do
they contain sufficient detail and guidance to ensure that all those
implementing them follow precisely the same and scrupulously fair procedures
and decisions for similar levels of work problems and grievances? In other words, would both the process and
the outcome of every grievance stand up to external legal scrutiny?
Do
you have appropriate record-keeping rules written into your procedures?
3.
Distribute
these policies and procedures to every one of your employees, including new
ones.
Does
every employee have copies of all these policies and procedures or know exactly
where they can find them? Or, are they
in a few employees’ offices or filing cabinets only, or only available to those
who have access to your computer system?
Do
new employees get them and/or find out about them as part of their induction?
4.
Make
sure that all your employees can understand all these policies and procedures,
and also that they have the knowledge and skills to follow them. In particular, make sure that all your
managers, supervisors and team leaders are actively promoting and ‘holding the
line’ about what is and is not acceptable
behaviour. This means actively skills-training
all employees, at regular intervals.
When
was the last time you trained your line managers, let alone your
non-supervisory staff, in these matters?
Can
you be sure every one of them knows exactly what is expected of them in
relation to EEO, diversity, discrimination, bullying and harassment, grievance
management, and counselling and discipline?
Can
you be sure they have both the willingness and the skills to implement your
expectations?
For
example, are all your line managers actively and appropriately intervening whenever they suspect, see, hear or are
told about any discrimination, harassment or bullying, or about any behaviour
that risks a possible claim of
discrimination, bullying or harassment?
Or, are they leaving your organisation legally liable for
discriminatory, harassing or bullying behaviour that someone in ‘management’
suspected or knew about? Or, are they
leaving your organisation legally liable for risky behaviour that someone in
‘management’ suspected or knew about and should have stopped earlier – that is,
before it led to someone being hurt
or offended and lodging an actual complaint?
If
you don’t have all of this in place, then not only are you leaving your
organisation open to valid and costly legal challenges but also your
organisation is not getting the best out of its employees.
You are almost certainly experiencing most
if not every one of the following:
Absenteeism
by those being discriminated against, bullied or harassed
Increased
work error rate
Increased
work accident rate, greater than necessary injury/stress claims and associated
rehabilitation costs and likely increase in your workers’ compensation premium
Low
morale
Decreased
productivity
Decrease
in the quality of work