What can we do to stop religious discrimination at workplace?

There are many ways by which religious discrimination at workplace can be avoided. Few of them are as below:

•Employers should develop internal procedures for processing the religious accommodation requests.
•Employers should provide training to the supervisors and managers on how to recognize the requests of religious accommodation from the employees.
•Employers should reduce the risk of religious discrimination by careful recording of the accurate business reasons for the performance related or disciplinary actions and sharing all these reasons with the affected employees.
•It is the employer’s duty to reduce the risk of discrimination in the employment decisions by establishing the written objectives for the candidate’s promotion or hire and making use of those criteria’s to all the candidates simultaneously.
•While conducting the interviews, the employers can ask the same questions to all the applicants for that particular job category, hence ensuring a non discriminatory treatment.
•Employers should inform their employees that they are making reasonable efforts in order to accommodate the employee’s religious practices.
•Also, once the employer notices an employee objecting to the religious conduct that has been directed at him, it becomes the employer’s duty to take steps to end that conduct. This is because even if there is a conduct that the employer does not think of abusive can later become pervasive or severe and can affect the employment conditions.
•If the harassment is by a non employee that has been assigned by a supervisor or a contractor, the individual of the chain of command should initiate a meeting for the harassment and should demand to make it stop, and ask the contractor to assign a different individual.
•If an employer faces customer bias like an adverse reaction to that of being served from an employee due to the religious issues, it becomes the duty of the employer to educate its customers about their misconception and also about equal employment laws.
•Employers need to allow religious expression among all the employees to the same level as they allow the other personal expression that is not disruptive or harassing.
•Even if the supervisors are allowed to engage in the certain religious expression, they should try and avoid the expression that might be taken by the subordinates as coercive due to their supervisory authority.
•Employees that receive the unwelcome religious conduct should ask the individual engaging in the conduct to stop it. If still it does not stop, they should report it to their supervisor or the appropriate authorities according to the anti-harassment policy of the company.
•In order to prevent the conflicts, employers should intervene immediately as they become aware of insulting conduct or objectively abusive conduct.
•Employers need to encourage their managers to discuss with their subordinates and intervene pro-actively whether a particular religious expression is welcome or not.
•Employees who are not willing to directly ask the individual who is directing an anti religious conduct towards them, they should report the conduct to their supervisor or the appropriate official according to the anti harassment policy.

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