The Cross Organisation Complaint
A woman filed a complaint against a man who did not work for her company. He was a vendor's employee, on site most days, with a desk and a login. The internal committee read the complaint, then spent two weeks arguing about whether it had the power to act at all. By the time anyone decided, the man had stopped coming to the site, and the complainant had stopped asking. The process had stalled on a question nobody had thought about until it mattered.
This is the cross organisation complaint. The respondent works elsewhere, and the neat assumption that a workplace handles its own people falls apart.
Why cross organisation complaints happen
Modern workplaces are not single organisations. They are clusters of them. A company shares a floor with a vendor, a contractor, a client team, a facility management firm, a security agency and a canteen operator. People from all of them are in the same building, using the same lifts, the same washrooms and often the same systems.
Harassment does not respect the dotted line on the org chart. A complaint can arise between two people who work for different employers but share a workplace. The person who is harassed is covered by her own employer's POSH process. The person who did it is covered by a different employer's, or by one that has no process at all.
- A vendor's employee harasses a client's employee.
- A contractor on site harasses a permanent employee.
- Two people from different outsourced teams harass each other.
- A client's visiting employee harasses a service provider's staff.
In each case, the workplace is shared, but the employers are not, and that is where the difficulty begins.
The question that stalls everything
When a cross organisation complaint arrives, the internal committee's first instinct is often to ask whether it has jurisdiction. The question is reasonable, and the way it is answered usually decides whether the complaint is handled or dropped.
The law places a duty on the employer to provide a safe workplace, and that duty is not limited to the employer's own staff. A workplace where a person can be harassed by someone from another organisation, with no process to address it, is not a safe workplace. The employer has a responsibility that extends to what happens on its premises and in its work, whoever the people involved happen to be employed by.
So the committee that simply throws the complaint out because the respondent is not on its payroll is likely to be wrong, and the complainant is left with no remedy at all. That outcome is the real failure, and it is the one we see most often.
What the process should do
The right approach is not to refuse the complaint. It is to handle the part you own and coordinate the rest.
- Receive the complaint. The complainant's employer has a duty to receive it, whatever the respondent's employment status.
- Assess the facts. The committee can establish what happened, in the shared workplace, using its own process.
- Act within your own control. If the respondent is not your employee, you may not be able to discipline him, but you can control his access to your premises, your systems and your staff.
- Notify the other employer. The respondent's employer has its own POSH duty, and it needs to be told, in writing, so it can act on its side.
- Coordinate. The two processes should not run in ignorance of each other, or they will reach inconsistent findings and confuse everyone involved.
The complainant's employer keeps its duty to her: to receive the complaint, to protect her from retaliation, to provide support, and to see the matter through as far as it can. The respondent's employer carries the duty to act against him. Neither can simply hand the whole thing to the other.
The contractual gap
Most cross organisation complaints are made harder by a contract that was never written to handle one. Vendors and contractors are brought on site with an agreement about delivery, price and timelines. The agreement rarely says anything about POSH.
That gap is fixable, and it should be fixed before there is a complaint, not after.
- Every contract with a vendor, contractor or service provider should carry a POSH clause, requiring the other party to have its own process and to cooperate with yours.
- The clause should set out how a complaint involving their staff will be handled, who to contact, and how the two employers will work together.
- The obligation to cooperate should be a condition of the contract, so that it has weight.
- New vendor staff on site should be covered by an awareness of the workplace's process, so they know it exists and applies to them.
A POSH clause in the vendor agreement turns a future argument into a settled question. It costs almost nothing to add and saves an enormous amount of confusion later.
What goes wrong when there is no plan
Without a plan, the same failures repeat. The committee debates jurisdiction while the complainant waits. The respondent's employer is never told, so no action is taken on its side. The complainant, seeing that nothing happens, withdraws or leaves. The vendor, whose staff member was named, learns nothing and changes nothing, so the same person causes the same problem at the next site.
Each of these is avoidable. The complaint itself is not, but the way it is handled is a choice, and the choice is made by whether the workplace planned for a cross organisation situation before it had one.
What we check in a shared workplace
- Are there vendor, contractor or outsourced staff on site or in your systems?
- Do your contracts with them carry a POSH clause requiring cooperation?
- Does your internal committee know how to handle a complaint where the respondent is not your employee?
- Is there a named point of contact on both sides for a shared complaint?
- Are non-employee staff aware of the workplace's POSH process?
Where the answers are no, the fix is a clause, a contact and a short plan, all of which can be put in place before the complaint that will test them.
Why this is a test of the whole process
A cross organisation complaint is one of the clearest tests of whether a POSH process is real. It is easy to run a process when the complainant and the respondent both report to you. It is much harder when the respondent does not, because then the process has to reach beyond the neat boundaries of the company. A workplace that can handle this kind of complaint has a process that genuinely protects people. A workplace that stalls on it has a process that works only when the situation is convenient.
We do not guess. We investigate. When we review POSH readiness, we ask about the people who work on your site but not on your payroll, because that is where the hardest complaints come from, and it is the question most companies have never asked themselves.