Explain The Best Practices For Equality Policy And Hr Procedures In Organisation.

Activity 5 – Best practices for equality policy and HR procedures in organisation

Developing and implementing equality and diversity policies within an organisation is fun-damental in ensuring that companies’ legal responsibilities are covered and in creating an inclusive, fair and respectful workplace (Kirton and Greene, 2016). This report shall explain why the compa-ny’s practices and behaviour of managers are inappropriate; moreover, it aims to outline the main equality policies that should be taken in order to ensure best practices and fairness at work. a) Inappropriate practices and behaviours of managers

Although the number of employees with disabilities is still low, promoting equal opportuni-ties is not only a good employment

This conduct is prohibited under the Irish legislation. The Employ-ment Equality Act (1998) defines sexual harassment as a physical coercion of sexual nature. Addi-tionally, it also provides that ‘any request for sexual favours from or any other act or conduct (…), shall constitute sexual harassment if the act, request or conduct is unwelcome and could reasonably be regarded as sexually, or otherwise on the gender ground, offensive, humiliating or intimidating’ (S23 EE Act 1998). In this context, the porter’s behaviour is offensive and it constitutes sexual har-assment. The employer is responsible, too. Employers are legally responsible for harassment carried out by co-employers, clients, customer, or other business contact and they are required to act in both preventative and remedial way to ensure compliance with the Act (Equality Authority, 2002). In a similar case, the Equality Tribunal in 2013 condemned an Irish employer to pay two years’ salary to a teenage girl subjected to physical and verbal harassment at work (McGreevy,

Job descriptions and person specifications should be clear and straight-forward and they should avoid statements that imply discrimination of candidates (Kirton and Greene, 2016) from all nine grounds named in the equality legislation (Equality Authority, ICTU, IBEC). Furthermore, inviting candidates to send photos can reflect negative stereotypes related to age or ethnic origin. Moreover, if the company provides an application form or on-line recruitment, they should only seek information that is pertinent to the skills of the candidate through systems that are also accessible to people with disabilities (e.g voice-activated reader system for sightless persons) (Equality Authority, ICTU, IBEC). To reduce bias and prejudices, more than one employee should carry out the selection process and the sift has to be checked at the