By Louise Trotter, CRSP, and Carla Hurley, CPHR
As of Sept. 1, Nova Scotia joined the rest of Canada in regulating workplace harassment under OHS law. For people leaders, this elevates both professional accountability and organizational liability in ways many haven’t experienced before.
When harassment incidents occur, they’re no longer contained to HR processes — they become part of the organization’s OHS system, reviewed by JOHSC committees, labour officers, and WCB adjudicators who will evaluate your communication, conflict management, and policy application through a regulatory lens. It’s no longer enough to focus only on your own leadership style; the environment created for your team is now a key accountability and legal requirement.
Leadership practices are now transparent
When it comes to harassment, prevention is preferable to investigation. Now that prevention of harassment is an OHS requirement, leaders need to be aware that when things go wrong, incidents and investigations don’t stay contained to the individuals involved; they become part of the organization’s OHS system and corporate record.
Aggregate data on incident nature, investigation types, findings, corrective actions, and controls may be requested, and HR/OHS will be expected to collate and share this information internally (e.g., Joint Occupational Health and Safety Committees) and with external bodies (e.g., provincial OHS officers or Workers’ Compensation Board adjudicators).
Should allegations of workplace harassment arise from leadership practices or workplace environments, these bodies will evaluate not only how leaders communicate, apply policies, and resolve conflicts, but also whether reasonable steps were taken to create a respectful, healthy, and safe workplace.
What was once considered good management practice — shaping culture, enabling employee experience, and driving performance — is now equally a matter of compliance, subject to reporting, oversight, and third-party evaluation. Simply put, your leadership style and the environment you create can protect or expose both you and your organization.
Harassment resulting in psychological injury can lead to workers’ compensation claims and OHS inspections and fines for non-compliance. Leaders have a significant opportunity for influence. When ignored or unmanaged, unhealthy workplaces emerge, employees experience psychological harm, and organizational liability increases.
For detailed guidance on how HR and OHS professionals are restructuring their partnership to support your compliance obligations, see Harassment Prevention: I’m an HR/OHS Professional — Now What? To understand your JOHSC’s evolving role in oversight, check out Harassment Prevention: I’m on JOHSC — Now What?
People leaders have accountability for self and others
Being intentional about how you lead and interact with employees is the first and most effective step in preventing harassment. Role-modelling respectful, psychologically safe leadership sets the tone for your team and reinforces trust. Leadership behaviour isn’t just a cultural influence — it’s now recognized as a workplace risk when not done well. Inconsistent, unclear, or intimidating practices can create stress, anxiety, and psychological harm, increasing organizational risk.
Leaders should pay attention to early signals such as employees hesitating to raise concerns, inconsistencies in how expectations are applied, or feedback suggesting your communication style could be improved. Remember, it’s not just intent that matters, but the impact your actions have on others. How you use authority and deliver feedback can either build confidence and clarity or amplify risk and harm.
How you manage your team also matters. Actively addressing conflict — rather than turning away and hoping employees “work it out” — and not ignoring issues simply because no one has filed a complaint are ways leaders can be intentional about creating a workplace free of harassment.
When these management risks go unaddressed, they create conditions where conflict escalates and poor behaviour emerges. Left unmanaged, those dynamics can spread through teams. Psychological safety and workplace risk management are inseparable: building a healthy culture depends on controlling the underlying risks that fuel harassment and harmful behaviours in the first place.
Reasonable management action versus harassment
Understanding this distinction matters more than ever. Managers still have the right and obligation to manage work and employee performance. Reasonable management action includes:
- Setting expectations and giving direction
- Managing performance and conducting evaluations
- Reassigning or scheduling work
- Enforcing company policies
- Applying discipline when appropriate
These actions are not harassment when delivered fairly, respectfully, and consistently.
Problems arise when feedback is demeaning, actions are inconsistent or intimidating, or harmful behaviours are repeated until they cause harm. Intent does not determine impact — if the outcome is degrading or intimidating, it may be considered harassment. The difference often lies not in what you do, but in how you do it.
Managing all workplace risks
Another critical change in Nova Scotia’s OHS Act is that “health and safety” now includes both physical and psychological health and safety. This expanded definition significantly broadens workplace requirements and increases leadership accountability.
The prevention of harassment is just one part of this picture. Under this new lens, harassment is categorized as a psychosocial hazard, but it’s not the only one. Standards such as ISO 45003:2021 outline a wide range of psychosocial hazards that employers must manage, including excessive workload, isolated work, unclear roles, inadequate resources, and poor physical environment.
For leaders, this means the role extends beyond setting a respectful culture — it includes identifying and reducing risks in the way work is organized, managed, and experienced. These risks emerge from how work is designed, organized, and managed. Your daily decisions about workload distribution, task completion, expectation setting, feedback delivery, and conflict management determine whether workplace risk is created or prevented.
Leadership accountability under expanded OHS requirements
The core duties in Nova Scotia’s OHS legislation haven’t changed, but their scope has. Responsibilities that once focused on physical safety now extend to psychological protection as well. For leaders, this means:
- Taking every reasonable precaution to protect workers, including their psychological health
- Ensuring timely and thorough investigation of harassment and related complaints
- Making sure workers comply with legislation and follow prescribed protective measures
- Providing clear written instructions on safety measures, policies, and procedures
What’s different now is the expectation that leaders treat workplace risks with the same level of diligence as physical hazards. This requires moving beyond a reactive stance to a preventive one — actively scanning for factors that could harm employee well-being, addressing issues early, and embedding psychological health into management practices.
Leaders who prioritize open communication, fair processes, and hazard reduction strategies aren’t just meeting compliance; they are shaping workplaces where employees can thrive safely.
Applying the hierarchy of controls to harassment and beyond
With psychological health and safety now embedded in OHS legislation, leaders can adopt a structured model traditionally used for physical risks: the hierarchy of controls. This approach focuses on reducing or eliminating hazards at their source before harm occurs.
When applied to harassment, the hierarchy might look like this:
- Elimination: Remove the hazard entirely by addressing the root cause, such as dismantling toxic teams or establishing zero tolerance for harassing behaviour from customers.
- Substitution: Replace informal, subjective processes with transparent ones, such as implementing fair workload distribution or objective performance metrics.
- Engineering controls: Strengthen organizational systems to reduce risk, such as confidential reporting channels, investigation protocols, and structured conflict resolution processes.
- Administrative controls: Establish and communicate policies, procedures, and training that clarify behavioural expectations and outline consequences for non-compliance.
- PPE/personal strategies: Support employees with resources like employee and family assistance programs, coaching, and mental health training.
This framework provides a practical way to move beyond relying solely on leadership behaviour or policy and toward systematic risk management. The same structure applies to other workplace risks such as excessive workload, poor communication, or unclear roles — risks that, if unmanaged, can create conditions where conflict and harmful behaviours escalate.
The real change isn’t in the legislation itself. It is in recognizing that workplace harassment rarely exists in isolation. Research consistently shows that harmful behaviours are symptoms of broader organizational issues: inadequate supervision, unclear expectations, poor communication systems, and insufficient accountability mechanisms. The new legislation provides leaders with an entry point to address these deeper workplace conditions.
Strategic opportunity and the bottom line
This legislation redefines leadership, shifting it from an optional development goal to a compliance obligation. Fair, consistent, and respectful management is no longer a “nice to have”; it’s a core requirement that strengthens culture, builds resilience, and reduces risk.
Proactive leadership now means more than preventing harassment. It involves designing work to minimize psychosocial hazards, monitoring team well-being, and applying systematic approaches like the hierarchy of controls to prevent harm. These actions aren’t just good practice; they are now essential for compliance and represent the organization’s first line of defence against legal and reputational risk.
For leaders, this is a call to lead differently. Your role isn’t simply about delivering results; it’s about creating the conditions where people can succeed safely. By managing interpersonal dynamics, psychosocial hazards, and the work environment with equal care, you not only protect employees from psychological harm but also reduce organizational liability and build a culture where both people and performance thrive.
When systemic psychosocial issues are ignored, they don’t just affect individuals; they create organizational exposure that extends far beyond a single complaint. The solution starts with leadership.
Understanding these new responsibilities is critical. Our Fall Training Series will provide the practical tools and frameworks your committee needs to handle the realities you’ll be facing in those first crucial weeks. Get on the early notification list and download ’15 Questions Every NS Employer is Asking’—because these questions are coming whether you’re ready or not.
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.
