A United States Court of Appeals recently reviewed some of the basic principles applicable to hostile environment sexual harassment cases.

The Court noted that a hostile working environment is a single unlawful practice under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A charge of discrimination based on such a practice covers all events during that hostile environment, if the charge is filed within 300 days (180 days in some states) of the last act alleged to constitute the discriminatory working condition.

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In today’s work environment we are seeing incredible stress and tension, especially in Canada due to the price of oil and resulting monumental task of building all of the oil sands facilities and related infrastructure.

According to some recently published statistics, there are 400,000 new jobs being created in Alberta between now and 2010 and an additional 100,000 jobs being created as the baby boomer generation begins to leave the workforce. Where are these workers going to come from? Alberta businesses are already experiencing shortages of workers to the point that some businesses have closed their doors. Some fast food restaurants have closed except for the drive-through windows. Turnover rates are skyrocketing. It is not uncommon for engineering firms to be experiencing 30% turnover rates and higher.

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Maintaining a safe workplace is almost but not entirely totally unlike following OSHA regulations. If complying with OSHA regulations at your lowest up front cost is your goal, then I suggest you read another site. However, if you are truly interested in keeping your employees safe and productive in your workplace then here are some workplace safety tips for you. They might even help you comply with some OSHA regulations along the way.

My Top Ten Workplace Safety Tips: continue reading »

Many surveys have been conducted on how stress affects the workplace. Some of the findings paint a pretty dismal picture about how much influence stress has on many aspects of work. For instance, a study in the United Kingdom estimated that up to 80% of industrial accidents could be attributed to stress. It concluded that stress could be costing the community up to $14 billion a year in lost productivity and health related costs. This is a huge amount of money that could be saved if the work environment could be made less stressful. The money saved could be used in far better ways like funding education or improving the health service. This article will discuss what makes a work environment stressful and how to make this environment stress free.

In the United Kingdom legislation is now in place whereby employers are obliged to offer stress awareness training to their employees. Even if the employee doesn’t take the training, so long as it has been offered, the companies have fulfilled their legal obligation. The intention is clear, however, that the government recognize how important it is to reduce stress in the workplace.

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Many experts believe that to facilitate discussion, and to make it easy to recognize, stress factors can be divided into two: internal and external. As obvious as it may seems, what were not evident within these two subdivisions are different strategies, and techniques needed to handle each. Managing office stress techniques due to external factors were totally different compared to techniques in managing internal factors. And these external factors must be identified, and isolated before they can be effectively dealt with.

Psychologists who run numerous studies and tests have identified many office stress external factors. If those factors were not properly identified, the most effective stress management techniques could not be used. This in turn brings about mental disorder and probably physical illness.

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