For many employees in abusive relationships, breaks from work are cause for fear, not celebration, and managers must therefore prepare for FDV disclosures, a leadership specialist says.
The Fair Work Commission has cleared an employee to pursue a late general protections claim, criticising her employer for arguing she should have been able to file it on time despite experiencing health issues and ongoing FDV.
The "optics" would be poor if an employer retained a senior employee who was convicted of domestic violence, a commission has found in rejecting his unfair dismissal appeal.
An employee who breached an AVO by approaching his former partner at work has failed to convince the Fair Work Commission it was a "family matter" and that his dismissal was unfair.
Opponents of trauma-informed investigations sometimes argue this approach weakens the process, but in fact the opposite is the case, according to a workplace culture specialist.
Work is not merely a location where intimate partner violence can occur, or where victim-survivors might escape it, according to researchers who say the problem is more fluid, "surfacing anywhere".
An employer and its senior leaders didn't bully an executive when they asked her repeatedly to return to the office, and started a performance improvement plan after a client complained about her, the Fair Work Commission has accepted.
When informing a director she was being investigated for breaching a code of conduct, an employer failed to take into account her experience of family and domestic violence, and its approach caused her to suffer a psychological injury, a tribunal has ruled.
Among the standards employers must meet to satisfy their positive duty to prevent workplace harassment, "leadership" is the most important, according to former Federal S-x Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins.
