You may want to check the law in your state. We have to take harassment training each year, and in my state what you are describing can be considered harassment under the law. This means that if the employee decides to complain to the state, the fact that you were apprised of this and did nothing could make you/your company liable. Our manager training tells us that these kind of situations need to be addressed as soon as they are brought to our attention.
Besides, how would you feel if the customer suddenly decides to get more aggressive and stalks her or accosts her in the parking lot, with bad results? Hoping it goes away is generally a bad strategy.
That’s a tough one. It’s true, you may be legally responsible for protecting her from harassment, even if that means “firing” the customer if talking to him doesn’t work. Then you’ve done your legal duty to protect her while she is working for you.
But having a talk with him has the potential to go wrong in so many ways. What if it causes him to escalate? You can ban him from the workplace but what if he starts lurking around outside trying to talk to her every time she enters or leaves? If he’s not threatening, especially if he claims he’s just trying to apologize, there’s very little she can legally do. You have a responsibility to keep your workplace safe, but do you want to do that at the expense of safety outside the workplace?
Talk to her. Tell her you have to do something, then decide together what to do. Maybe you can arrange to be there whenever he comes in for a while. If she thinks she can defuse it in short order, let her try but let her know you can step in if she can’t.
If you think he needs a “talking to”, reach an agreement with her as to exactly what you are going to say. Maybe you can frame in the context of “this is what I overheard, and it disturbed me”….that way he won’t know she complained. However you decide to approach, reach a agreement with her as to exactly what you will say….and not say….and stick to the script. If she won’t agree to let you talk to him, keep working on her.
But I’m going to disagree with others here and say that if she won’t agree to you talking to him, don’t. You need to keep communication open and if you act against her wishes, she just won’t tell you next time. You can try to minimize the time she’s alone with him, though.
We’ve done this. She insists that I should butt out at this point. I would prefer to fire the client (never liked him, now I’m disgusted by him) but she specifically asked that I do nothing. I’m not going against her wishes.
If you “never liked” this client, might there be other reasons to fire him? Unrealistic time frames/deadlines, a late payment, a project that went sour?
I’ve been in this situation, and I’ve managed to keep things light but still say “Oh, and quit hitting on the receptionist. I noticed… hell, everyone’s noticed. NOT cool.” In this case, the guy raised both hands as if to say “Hey, I’m maintaining plausible deniability here, but I’ll quit it if other people think there’s a problem…” and I went on with our meeting.
So, not sure he learned a lesson that’ll change a scuzzy personality, but he never did it at our office again.
Her wishes in this regard do not matter. She could say she doesn’t want you to do anything yet still quit and file a lawsuit for a hostile workplace. And she would win. Once you are aware of the situation, it is your duty to respond. We have almost this exact same scenario in our annual ethics training. The lawyer who conducts the training, absolutely rips a new one into the manager who followed the wishes of the employee. As the owner, you have even more incentive than some mid-level manager of a corporation.
My response was to tell her I was going to fire him and she objected vigorously. I guess she’d find it embarrassing maybe? She told me something in confidence, no way am I going to go against her wishes.
I can’t tell him to take his business elsewhere because he grosses me out. He has always paid me for services rendered (I do no billing). If I only saw people I liked, I could work half a day a week.
So when your employee eventually realizes they have a slam dunk case against you, your plan is to just hope that they don’t sue and take the free money?
“It’s a bold strategy Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off for him.”
Couldn’t you dump him as a client for another reason? He’s a late payer… your business moved into a different direction… his actions have the appearance of impropriety and is about to lose you a bigger client… your security cameras caught him pocketing something and you can’t abide theft… he farted in the elevator and hit every button when your banker was in the car with him.
@kayaker, I like you, but I’m going to add my voice to the choir. If the client is of zero value to you, find a way to tell him to quit hitting on your receptionist or take his business elsewhere. You’re the boss. You have the right to choose your clients, your employee doesn’t. If she thinks he’s creepy, she doesn’t need to protect him for your business’s sake. You need to think of her and she needs to think of herself. If she was OK with it, she wouldn’t have spoken up. And if sher told you that in confidence, aren’t you breaking that confidence by telling us, strangers though we are?
Telling the client to knock it off has the benefit of communicating to all your employees that you value them more than a client.
We “passed on a project” halfway through (after many contradictory changes that were keeping people at work very late, and on weekends), and morale skyrocketed!
As a former front desk employee who had to endure more than my share of creepy guys hitting on me because it was my job to be nice to them, I add my voice to the chorus of people telling you to fire this client, @kayaker. We women have been conditioned not to make waves and to make everyone happy, which might be feeding into your receptionists request to you, but it’s in her best interest and yours to ditch this guy. I wish my former employers had stood up for me against these men, but they were more interested in the money they were bringing in than their employees comfort levels.
Please note that this was my former employer that did this.
True story: Once I was staying at a friend’s house when he lived across the street from a small church. It was Easter. I woke up on Easter Sunday and I swear I heard bagpipes playing at the church. “That’s an odd choice for the sunrise service,” I thought.
Then I woke up the rest of the way and realized my friend was playing the Bob Dylan album he bought the day before.
Well, I’ve had two additional discussions with my employee. She is adamant that she does not want me to do anything. She says what she told me was shared in confidence. I told her it wasn’t right for a client at work who is over twice her age to be bothering her. She insists that his age is no big deal, she’d date someone older then her, but she just thought it was funny because he’s such an ogre.
He does look like an ogre.
I’m not sure why she refuses to go along with me firing the guy. I thought maybe he knew her dad (she and her two kids live with her father) or maybe she knew the guy outside of work some way.
This is not the first “drama” she has asked me about. She came to me for advice when her boyfriend beat her up. I introduced her to my lawyer and she got some advice. I also gave her paid time off for court dates. No idea on the final outcome, but there have been no more black eyes. She came to me when her one kid was pretty ill and I introduced her to my daughter (a nurse). They are friends now. Maybe she’ll discuss the ogre with my daughter.
One thing I like to do is think about what the past looks like ten years from now. And I don’t want you to think, 10 years from now, ‘wow, maybe putting all that stuff on the SDMB, being told there were legal consequences to not acting, me not acting and justifying not acting… maybe that wasn’t that all that great since her attorney’s 24 year-old punk legal assistant effectively broke my anonymity in 3 hours of coffee-fueled context research?’
I wouldn’t necessarily take any more advice from the SDMB, except maybe this: talk to an attorney about your liability here, including that you put this in an ‘anonymous’ online forum, and act accordingly.