■ Jacqueline Teo

HR director

Acergy Asia and Middle East

Like having integrity, not condoning sexual harassment is implicit within our culture. We want everyone to work with integrity but we don’t exactly have a policy on integrity. Certainly in Acergy, we believe people are central to our business and therefore, we want equal respect and treatment for all our people. Leadership plays an important role in communicating this culture to the rest of the employees.

If an employee came to me with a sexual harassment situation, first of all, I will launch an investigation to see whether there is merit, followed by a disciplinary process. We want to provide an avenue for victims so they don’t feel trapped. Sometimes it is also giving employees the confidence to speak up.

In this day and age, people should know what sexual harassment is and furthermore we are now at the age where we are more liberal but we are also more informed and better educated. For example, the Chinese tend to be about maintaining “face”. It is giving people that safe confidential avenue within where they can go to. You have to be able to keep staff confidentiality or you should not be in HR. HR must play a strong advocate for equal employment.

■ Chan Phak Sung

Director of international human resources and corporate affairs

MindChamps Holdings

Sexual harassment is typically a Westernised concept, “a western phenomenon”, and we in this part of Asia, are connected to that behaviour. As we enter into the global markets, such concept will invariably affect us here. It has come to a stage whereby in Asia, sexual harassment is a paranoia so I think it is good to temper it. If not, every gesture can be constituted as sexual harassment. A touch or a tap on the shoulder can be construed as that. That would not be healthy for the workplace.

We should have in place, some form of education in the organisation. You have to inculcate in people that respect for each other and let them know the consequences if sexual harassment should happen. Once a situation has been reported, we would quickly look into the matter. We want to show that we are serious about such things. We must swiftly and objectively resolve it in no more than a week lest it affects the morale of the people.

Without a thorough investigation, there may be cases of people crying foul. If it’s a cry wolf situation, that person with a malicious intention would have to be dealt with. We need to be careful.

Currently, we don’t have a sexual harassment policy as we have a very healthy environment here. We have a healthy respect and understanding of each other’s boundaries and space. We haven’t reached that stage where we need to bother about that. There is no point creating something that may stir up unwarranted tension. That is not to say we want to be reactive. We want to be proactive but we must also look into our business priorities.

■ Jessie Lim

Executive director of HR

Lenovo Asia Pacific

Personally, I came from a prior company that has raised my values system in a way that I would not condone such misconduct. To me, sexual harassment is a very serious misconduct and I really think companies should not tolerate with such behaviour.

If I have a case where there is evidence telling me there is sexual harassment on the part of the certain individual, we would be very strict. We will execute based on what the verdict says. If the person is guilty, he or she will have to face serious consequences. We will tell the employee to go.

After action has been taken against the guilty party, we would also provide support to the victim in terms of counselling. We need to make sure he or she gets the right amount of support to help him or her overcome the unpleasant circumstances.

On a bigger front, we conduct orientations once every year for newcomers. They need to understand the expectations around our business codes of conduct. We would do an annual training where we will share these expectations with employees that sexual harassment is not condoned. If anyone runs afoul, there are very serious consequences, including termination. You need to set the context where this is not tolerant.