What is Wellness Check?
A wellness check is an effort to make sure workers are safe, healthy, and able to fulfill their job responsibilities. Often conducted by employers, wellness checks are usually undertaken in the presence of a manager and are designed to ensure that employees have the necessary resources to perform their jobs. Wellness checks may involve physical examinations, meetings, work environment evaluations, and reviews of individual job performance.
What is Harassment?
Harassment is a type of discrimination that involves intimidating, hostile, or offensive conduct that is directed at an individual or group of individuals based on their protected characteristic. It can also include stalking, verbal abuse, and physical contact, such as unwanted touching.
When Does Wellness Check become Harassment?
For a wellness check to be legally considered as harassment, it must involve conduct that is severe and pervasive enough to create a hostile work environment or an intimidating workplace. In other words, if a wellness check creates an environment that is hostile, intimidating or offensive due to a person’s protected class (such as their race, gender, age, or disability) then it is considered illegal. In addition, the offending conduct must be clearly linked to the individual’s membership in a protected class in order to be considered harassment under the law.
Legal Insights
When it comes to legally assessing wellness checks, there are certain guidelines that apply. For starters, courts will examine when and whether the conduct creates a hostile work environment or otherwise creates an atmosphere of fear or intimidation to determine if it amounts to harassment.
Finally, courts have also looked at whether the employer provided alternative methods of conducting the wellness check–such as verbal questioning instead of physical touching or inspection of company property–to determine if harassment has occurred.
Prevention
Organizations should take proactive steps to ensure that their wellness checks don’t become harassment. To begin, employers should make sure that all wellness checks are done in accordance with any applicable laws, regulations, and company policies. Additionally, businesses should ensure that all wellness checks they conduct are necessary and conducted in a respectful manner.
By following these guidelines, employers can help ensure that their policies are effective in promoting employee safety and wellbeing while avoiding any potential legal liability.
