By Louise Trotter, CRSP and Carla Hurley, CPHR
With Nova Scotia’s new harassment prevention legislation taking effect Sept. 1, 2025, many organizations are focused on updating policies and communicating new definitions. That’s important, but it’s only the surface.
The more profound change lies in how roles interact when harassment becomes a regulated workplace hazard under Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) legislation. For the first time, harassment is not just a cultural or human relations issue managed through HR; it must also be tracked, reported, assessed, and controlled like any other workplace hazard.
This creates a new reality: HR and OHS must work together intentionally, bringing two lenses to the same hazard — HR with its focus on people and organizational culture, and OHS with its expertise in hazard identification, systematic risk assessment, and control. Together, these perspectives create better prevention outcomes and healthier workplaces.
From culture steward to compliance partner
Traditionally, HR’s role in harassment prevention focused on:
- Building a respectful and inclusive workplace culture
- Developing Codes of Conduct, Respectful Workplace, DEI and internal harassment policies
- Collaborating with OHS in harassment/violence prevention policies and supporting procedures
- Supporting people leaders and employees through coaching and mediation
- Delivering training on interpersonal skills and respectful behaviours
- Leading internal investigations, when appropriate, and facilitating external investigations
- Facilitating corrective actions, workplace restoration among employees and teams and addressing labour relations
These responsibilities remain, but they must now be integrated with OHS processes for hazard management. Under the new legislation, harassment, either internal or external, is classified as a psychosocial hazard and must be managed within the same framework as other workplace hazards, like physical risks. This creates new integration points between HR and OHS.
Two lenses, shared outcomes
The shift to treating harassment as a regulated hazard creates an opportunity for HR and OHS to combine their distinct but complementary expertise. Each brings essential capabilities that, when integrated, develop more robust prevention and response systems than either could achieve alone.
HR lens of expertise:
- Organizational culture, leadership development and training
- Individual case management, investigation facilitation and restoration
- Interpersonal dynamics and labour relations
OHS lens of expertise:
- Systematic risk assessment and hazard control
- Organizational accountability
- Legal compliance and audit readiness
When these lenses work together, the organization gains a more complete picture: individual and organizational well-being on one side, system and compliance assurance on the other. Both perspectives target the same outcome—harm reduction, stronger prevention, and healthier workplaces.
Building the HR-OHS partnership: A best practice sequence
Organizations with both HR and OHS functions should follow a structured sequence to align harassment prevention under the new framework:
Policy integration
- Start with existing respectful workplace/harassment policies and complete a gap analysis against OHS requirements.
- Think about both internal (employee) and external (customer, patient, public) perspectives.
- Embed JOHSC consultation into the policy review cycle.
Incident response pathway
- Define how alleged harassment incidents, internal or external, progress from investigation to resolution.
- Clarify handoffs between HR’s confidential case management and OHS’s hazard reporting responsibilities.
Investigation protocols
- Ensure HR facilitates or coordinates individual employee investigations to preserve confidentiality and procedural fairness.
- Confirm OHS receives general hazard data to track trends and plan prevention strategies.
Training and communication
- Train managers on legislative definitions, reasonable management action, and early intervention.
- Educate employees on their rights, reporting pathways, and expectations for respectful conduct.
- Reinforce JOHSC’s role in system oversight, not case-level adjudication.
HR–OHS cadence
- Establish regular joint meetings (i.e., monthly) to review incidents and hazard data.
- Ensure HR reports on complaint resolution (confidential), and OHS consolidates hazard data for JOHSC reporting.
- Leverage OHS professionals to identify systemic risks and recommend organizational controls (i.e., applying the Hierarchy of Controls to psychosocial risks such as harassment).
System learning and JOHSC oversight
- Through OHS, provide JOHSC with anonymized trend data so that they can review for policy effectiveness and prevention measures.
- Incorporate JOHSC feedback and recommendations into workplace practices, leadership requirements, training, organizational systems, etc.
Expansion to broader psychosocial hazards
- Once harassment prevention systems are in place, lean on OHS professionals to extend the framework to address other ISO 45003 psychosocial hazards, such as workload, isolated work, work-life balance, role clarity, exposure to traumatic events, and organizational change.
When HR and OHS collaborate, leveraging respective expertise, workplaces move from reactive complaint handling to proactive prevention of psychological injury and illness.
Reporting and privacy
One of the most immediate changes for HR is the duty to ensure harassment hazards are recorded within the OHS system. This means that information that was once considered the purview of HR in employee files is now required as part of the Occupational Health and Safety Management System. Understandably, HR professionals, employers and employees may question how to balance employee privacy with the obligation to report workplace hazards. The following guidance can help:
- If behaviour does not meet the legal definition, HR/Management should address the issue immediately to prevent escalation. Confidential employee information is preserved. No OHS reporting is required.
- If the behaviour does meet the definition, HR proceeds with the appropriate level of investigation and then has additional obligations and responsibilities: o OHS must be engaged for hazard/incident reporting, risk assessment, and control measures. o Aggregate data (i.e., nature of incidents, type of investigation completed, founded/unfounded, corrective actions, controls, etc.) must be compiled so that it can be easily pulled and shared as required with JOHSC, management and labour if needed. o HR continues to safeguard employee confidentiality and may redact investigation details for sharing with OHS and/or JOHSC.
Privacy is protected by separation:
- HR is responsible for ensuring the confidential reporting of harassment complaints, employee relations, and case management, as well as completing investigations promptly. HR retains all individual case files, investigation notes, and disciplinary records.
- OHS receives incident reports that capture the nature of the hazard (i.e., location of events, nature of incident, contributing factors) for hazard identification, risk assessment, and control. Investigation details are shared only as required to fulfill OHS and Workers’ Compensation legislative requirements.
- JOHSC receives aggregated and anonymized data, including the total number of alleged and confirmed harassment incidents, dates and locations of events, relevant contributing factors (i.e., bullying, inappropriate sexual conduct, etc.), control measures taken, and trending/pattern information.
This separation ensures individual confidentiality is preserved while still allowing for systematic hazard recognition, prevention, and control.
Strategic opportunity for HR
This shift is more than a compliance requirement. It’s an opportunity to elevate HR’s strategic impact in enabling psychosocial risk management, leveraging the expertise of their OHS colleagues. HR professionals can:
- Be more proactive, rather than reactive, by moving beyond case-by-case management into the prevention of psychosocial hazards.
- Build new partnerships and ongoing collaboration with OHS professionals, leveraging their systematic, process-oriented expertise.
- Blend culture and systems, use hazard data and OHS frameworks to strengthen HR’s culture-building efforts.
- Extend this system-based thinking beyond harassment by applying the same approach to workload, role clarity, change management, and other ISO 45003 psychosocial hazards.
- Contribute to HR’s positioning as a strategic partner, alongside their OHS colleagues, in workplace mental health and safety, driving both compliance and organizational performance.
Bottom Line
For HR professionals, Nova Scotia’s new harassment legislation is a structural shift from managing harassment as an interpersonal issue alone to addressing it as a regulated hazard.
This requires HR and OHS to work together with complementary expertise:
- HR focuses on employees and organizational culture
- OHS focuses on hazards and systems
When done well, HR and OHS can create a workplace where employees are healthy and safe, physically and psychologically.
Same hazard. Two lenses. Better prevention outcomes. Healthier workplaces.
This challenge is precisely why we’re launching our Fall Training Series this October. Join our community to be notified when registration opens and get our free guide: ’15 Questions Every NS Employer is Asking About Harassment & OHS’—the real questions you’ll be facing come September.
Louise Trotter is the founder and executive consultant at Sprout Safety, providing OHS consulting with expertise in the healthcare and education sectors. Carla Hurley is the founder of HURLEY HR, specializing in strategic human resources solutions. Together, they’re combining OHS systematic approaches with HR expertise to help organizations navigate the new harassment prevention landscape.
