Cohesive crews and tenacious teams: Writing anti-harassment policies in challenging environments

Major anti-harassment legislative changes are due to be implemented this October under the Employment Rights Act 2025 - are you ready? Drawing on their experience of working on board the largest ocean-going wooden ship in the world, Georgie Williams offers fresh perspectives on the vital importance of crowdsourcing when carrying out risk assessments and writing policies.

How would your life change if you slept next to 20 of your colleagues every night?

It sounds like a strange hypothetical: a workplace environment turned into a constant sleepover. It also sounds like a high-risk environment for harassment. In HR, avoiding harm and harassment in the workplace is a top priority - but avoiding said harm is a difficult and multifaceted task. In April, the Trades Union Congress reported that eight in 10 workers had experienced abuse at work in the past year: abuse perpetrated by both members of the public and colleagues.

Regardless of our roles, teams or workplace environments, all of us face some risk of mistreatment, harassment, bullying or psychological harm in our workplaces. However, the nature of work for many of us means reaching the end of our working day where we clock off, go home and create psychological and physical distance between ourselves and our colleagues.

What could we learn from those of us who don't clock off and go home?

My experience of writing anti-harassment policies started during my time on board the Götheborg of Sweden, the largest ocean-going wooden ship in the world, where a bunk was a luxury and a hammock squeezed between everyone else's hammocks was a likely bedtime setup.

In 2022, when I first sailed on the Götheborg, I was astounded at how cohesive and often harmonious the culture was among the working crew. It takes a strong sense of community and duty to ensure that 60 to 80 sailors - paid, volunteering or even paying to sail - can work, eat, relax and sleep in close quarters with minimal conflict. During my time aboard, I made it my responsibility to enshrine protections for this community in their new anti-harassment policy.

So how do we write effective anti-harassment policies - and what can we learn from how these are developed for high-risk workplaces?

Assessing risk in the workplace?

When it comes to matters of harassment and bullying, all workplaces carry some risk. Working in teams requires us to address conflict and to develop trusting bonds with our fellow team members. Put simply, we cannot avoid all risk of unwanted behaviour without eliminating any and all communication between employees.

However, assessing risk and applying it to policy is not about simply acknowledging this risk as inevitable; it is about implementing any and all necessary safeguards and endeavouring to facilitate the safest environment possible in the context of such risk. Risk assessments require us to consider not just the probable but the possible - and ensure that the policies and practices in place provide employees with a clear, defined set of actions with which to address any possible incidents, ideally before they arise.

The importance of lived experience - listen to everyone

However, when it comes to risk assessment for harassment and bullying, we cannot simply rely on our own analyses of a workplace. Lived experience is an essential factor. We use this term to describe the amalgamation of experiences people are exposed to which may (or may not) be contingent on personal factors such as gender, race, disability and other protected characteristics. These characteristics can often form a lens through which we perceive certain events, interactions and experiences - and our personal lenses may inform what potential risks we do or do not notice in the workplace. Put simply, we need to crowdsource insight and expertise when determining what risks are possible or probable in our workplace.

What can lived experience show us? Aside from reporting on potential risks, our interviews and conversations with employees can inform us how effective (or ineffective) pre-existing control measures are. I have seen how communication channels for escalating concerns are often impacted by a lack of training and awareness.

A chain of command may exist and policies may encourage escalation of concerns, but escalation may place matters in the hands of supervisors or managers who are less familiar with what is required to de-escalate potential inappropriate conduct. I have had this reported in interviews with and reports made by more junior employees who could attest to a lack of essential training and guidance that made a chain of escalation ineffective.

The very act of including colleagues at differing levels in the risk assessment process was a means of bolstering psychological safety in the Götheborg's crew. Psychological safety is only achieved when colleagues feel that channels of communication exist for reporting both negative and positive experiences - without any punitive measures for those speaking up.

"Appropriate" risk - who decides?

We cannot entirely risk-proof our workplaces, but we also do not want to task our colleagues and employees with making individual judgment calls on how much risk they are willing to encounter. This is where the question of "appropriate" risk comes in. How much is acceptable for the functioning of an organisation?

Sailing on the Götheborg, physical risk was inevitable. Climbing 60 feet up a rig to furl sails was undeniably risky, let alone at night, with no lights, somewhere in the Atlantic. However, all precautions and procedures were in place to limit this risk wherever possible. My goal was to provide the same precautions and procedures for any risk to the psychological or emotional safety of our crew. When I offered to rewrite our anti-harassment policy, it was because I believed that the nature of our work environment attracted ambitious, driven people, who may be more likely to take decisions around personal risk into their own hands.

Lived experience is undeniably valuable when identifying risks around harassment and bullying. However, our responsibility in HR and people positions is to take that information, create appropriate protections around that risk and ensure that nobody is expected to rely on lived experience to make a judgment call on whether or not they have experienced inappropriate behaviour. Our guidance, our training and our policies should be clear and objective. This takes the burden of decision-making off people who are most affected so they do not have to decide what "counts" as harassment.

Nevertheless, there is a lot we can do cohesively to reduce the risk of harassment and bullying. One of my additions to the Götheborg's policy was the following: "Employees should discourage such behaviour by making it clear that they find it unacceptable and by supporting colleagues if they are experiencing harassment or bullying and are considering making a complaint." Although this may be a relatively standard addition, the phrase "making it clear that they find it unacceptable" - a cornerstone of bystander training - felt important.

Our crew, which was female-majority and included a high number of LGBTQ+ individuals, was best supported when voices outside that community, notably heterosexual male crew members in authoritative positions, made their opinions on our inclusive culture clear and unambiguous. An effective anti-harassment policy doesn't just address what harassment could look like and how to manage it; it also requires employees to foster an anti-harassment culture.

Transforming observations into policy

Effective workplace policies should enable efforts towards an ideal working environment while also recognising the realities of the current working environment. We never want to reinforce harmful workplace practices with inadequate policies. However, we also should not write policies that require an avoidance of risk that significantly hinders work and employee cohesion.

Workplace friendships can breathe life into teams and organisations - but all friendship comes at risk of inappropriate behaviour. My Götheborg risk assessment made it evident that an effective policy should focus predominantly on recognising those risks - and making it clear to crew that anything outside of a consensual comfort zone was grounds to refer to this policy.

When transforming the risk assessment into a proposed policy, I emphasised the different forms that harassment and bullying could take in our workplace. Even a crew member trying to knock another crew member off balance during a weight-bearing task was a substantial safety risk, both physical and psychological. I wanted to include a list of potential acts of bullying and harassment because, in my observation, crew members could recognise personal discomfort but not easily label their experience as harassment when it occurred.

I also focused on the duties employees had for the conduct of those they brought into this shared space. Bringing a stranger aboard a ship like the Götheborg meant inviting unvetted people into the living and sleeping quarters of fellow crew members. It was imperative that crew members inviting guests into this space be held accountable for their guests' conduct as if it were their own. Although this is a requirement that feels particularly important in a workplace like Götheborg, it should be more present in anti-harassment policies generally. Workspaces are environments over which we all hold some responsibilities of stewardship, regardless of rank or role.

With the submission of my revised policy, I strongly advised that it should not be regarded as a fix-all: no policy can be. Effective policies must be supported by adequate training and education, not only because this makes employees aware of what inappropriate behaviour looks like, but because it ensures that when a concern is escalated, we can state confidently that the employee engaging in potential misconduct was provided with the knowledge and training required to avoid that behaviour.

Whether we're fixing rigging on the high seas or chasing deadlines at our desks, all of us hold a responsibility to help maintain harassment-free workplaces - and our policies should be a cornerstone of those efforts. Reflecting the lived experience and knowledge of our peers, they should be a source of truth for all who feel uncertain about their safety in a workplace.

Risk-free environments are no more than a mirage on the horizon, but the ability to support our colleagues in the face of risk is firmly in our hands.