Workplace Harassment

The legal definition of harassment

Under federal law, harassment is a form of discrimination prohibited by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act and GINA. The conduct has to be connected to a protected characteristic: race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation and gender identity), national origin, age 40 or older, disability or genetic information. State and local laws often add more, such as marital status, height or weight.

That link matters. A manager who is rude to everyone is a management problem, and many employers prohibit it under a respectful workplace policy, but it is usually not unlawful harassment. A manager who is rude only to the Muslim employees on the team is a different story.

Unlawful harassment takes two main forms:

• Quid pro quo. A supervisor makes a job benefit depend on submitting to sexual advances, or punishes the employee for refusing. This sometimes comes from a single incident, and it most often involves a supervisor with authority over pay, schedule or promotion.
• [Hostile work environment](/glossary/hostile-work-environment/). Conduct that is severe or pervasive enough that a reasonable person would find the work environment hostile or abusive, and the employee actually perceived it that way. Courts look at frequency, severity, whether it was physically threatening or humiliating and whether it interfered with work. One serious incident, like a physical assault, can be enough. A pattern of lesser comments can also add up.

Examples of harassment in the workplace

Harassment can be verbal, written, visual, physical or digital. Some examples that commonly lead to complaints:

• Repeated comments about a coworker's body, sexual jokes or unwanted requests for dates after a clear no.
• Slurs, mocking accents or nicknames based on race or national origin.
• Pressure on employees to join or leave a religion, or ridicule of religious dress.
• Jokes about older workers being slow with technology, or comments about retirement aimed at one person.
• Imitating a coworker's disability or stammer.
• Sharing offensive memes in team chats, or harassing messages on personal social media between coworkers.
• Displaying offensive symbols, such as a noose or swastika.

Remote work moved a lot of this to chat tools and video calls. Harassment in a team channel at 11 p.m. is still workplace harassment.

When employers are liable

Liability depends on who the harasser is.

• Supervisors, with a tangible employment action. If harassment by a supervisor leads to a firing, demotion, pay cut or similar action, the employer is automatically liable. Under Vance v. Ball State University (2013), a supervisor is someone empowered to take tangible employment actions against the victim, not just someone who assigns daily tasks.
• Supervisors, without a tangible action. The employer can avoid liability under the Faragher/Ellerth defense (two 1998 Supreme Court cases) by proving both that it used reasonable care to prevent and promptly correct harassment and that the employee unreasonably failed to use the complaint process or other preventive opportunities.
• Coworkers and non-employees. The employer is liable if it knew or should have known about the harassment and failed to take prompt and appropriate corrective action. This covers customers, patients, vendors and contractors.
• Owners and top executives who act as the company's alter ego can make the employer liable without any defense.

The third category is a big deal in customer-facing operations. Contact center agents dealing with abusive callers, retail staff harassed by regular customers, and staffing workers harassed at a client site all fall under it. Staffing agencies and their clients can both be liable for harassment of a placed worker.

What a harassment policy needs

The Faragher/Ellerth defense only works if the employer has an effective policy. The EEOC rescinded its 2024 Enforcement Guidance on Harassment in the Workplace in January 2026, so what counts as effective now comes from the statutes and court decisions. A solid policy:

• Defines prohibited harassment with examples, in plain language and in the languages the workforce speaks.
• Applies to everyone, including executives, customers and vendors.
• Offers several ways to complain that bypass the direct manager, such as HR, a hotline and a named senior leader.
• Promises a prompt, impartial workplace investigation and confidentiality to the extent possible.
• Prohibits retaliation against anyone who complains or participates.
• Is distributed at hire, acknowledged in writing, and repeated regularly.

Training is required by law in several states. California requires two hours for supervisors and one hour for non-supervisory staff every two years at employers with five or more employees; New York requires annual interactive training for all employers; Illinois requires annual training; Connecticut requires training at employers with three or more employees. Good harassment training uses scenarios that match the actual job, not generic office examples.

How to respond to a complaint

Speed and documentation matter more than anything else.

1. Acknowledge the complaint the same day or next business day, even if it came informally to a supervisor.
2. Take interim steps if needed: schedule changes, separating the parties, or administrative leave for the accused. Do not move the complainant to a worse shift or location; that looks like retaliation.
3. Assign a trained, neutral investigator. For senior accused employees, use someone outside the reporting line or an outside investigator.
4. Interview the complainant, the accused and witnesses, and collect documents and messages.
5. Decide whether policy was violated, based on the evidence, and document the reasoning.
6. Take corrective action proportionate to the conduct and follow up with the complainant afterward.

Two federal laws limit how sexual harassment claims can be handled. The Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act (2022) lets employees take these claims to court despite an arbitration agreement, and the Speak Out Act (2022) makes pre-dispute nondisclosure and non-disparagement clauses unenforceable for sexual harassment and assault claims. State laws on harassment differ, and employers should check local training, policy and settlement rules.