Hugging and Grabbing Your Employees is Harassment in Business and at Work

Especially if you’re the Executive Producer, and you’re hugging and touching a subordinate writer employee without their consent. Your position of power compounds and seals the harassment deal.

Even worse: after they complain about you hugging and touching them, you make the mistake of deciding to (coincidentally) exclude them from meetings. You didn’t intend to exclude them, but the impact on the writer employee – and their colleague writer employees – is that you did.

You were sent to your own personal sexual harassment prevention training, and warned not to touch employees again. In most workplaces, touching employees in the manner described above is grounds for immediate termination. In a few workplaces, the harasser in the power position gets to keep their job – which never ends well, especially for the subordinate employees you impacted with your lapse in judgment, and their peers.

Consequently, the writer employee you touched resigned in frustration, and their writer colleague soon followed.

Your organization agreed to pay the two writer employees what was owed to them in their respective contracts, without requiring a confidentiality agreement.

You still have your job, and you’re still in charge. However, your harassment was covered extensively in the media over the last few days, hurting your reputation and that of your organization. Who, in reality, would want to work with you and your organization, from a recruitment and retention standpoint?

Avoid hugging and grabbing your employees (and then making decisions which can impact as retaliation) in business and at work – because it’s harassment.