One of the biggest mistakes you can make as an employer is to treat an employee differently, or unfairly, for any reason. You could be opening yourself up to an accusation of discrimination, even if it's unintentional on your part.
What is workplace discrimination?
In a world where the possible grounds for discrimination have now reached well into double figures, and with there being almost as many different types of discrimination as there are protected characteristics, it is almost inevitable that virtually every employee has at least one ground to make an accusation that they may have been discriminated against.
Under the Equality Act 2010, discrimination in the workplace is unlawful and can cost employers significant amounts in compensation if they are caught committing a discriminatory act. You might think that most people know they should not discriminate unlawfully against a person and whilst that is largely true, it is easy to accidentally discriminate against someone, simply by not fully considering the effects of a given action.
Discrimination is only unlawful if it occurs on the grounds of a protected characteristic. These are as follows:
- Age
- Race
- Religion
- Belief
- Gender
- Sexual Orientation
- Pregnancy and maternity
- Marital Status
- Disability
These protected characteristics apply whether the employee has that characteristic or not. Since the Equality Act 2010, a person can still be discriminated against because of a perceived protected characteristic, or because of their association to someone who has that characteristic.
Some examples of this would be an employee who feels they are being paid less than their male colleagues because they are female, an employee who believes they have been missed out on a promotion due to their age, or a candidate for a job who thinks they didn’t get the role because of their religion.
What does our Discrimination Training offer?
With compensation having no upper cap, and regularly reaching six figure sums, it is a worthwhile investment to understand exactly how discrimination laws operate and most importantly, how to avoid claims for the hefty sums.
During this discrimination training course, you will learn about:
- The protected characteristics
- The types of general discrimination
- Character specific types of discrimination
- How to identify discrimination
- Enforcing discrimination complaints
Course duration: 1/2 day
To find out more about our Discrimination course, contact us today.
To find out more about this course, please call us on 0845 2626 260.
