650+ participate in 10th edition of ESCAPE Laboral
More than 650 people, including human resources specialists, lawyers and other professionals, participated in the 10th edition of the ESCAPE Laboral workshop, which marked the 40th anniversary of the nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing child abuse.
“Each of these 10 years has allowed us to transform the lives of dozens of families who have come to us looking for tools to prevent family violence,” said Yadira Pizarro-Quiles, executive director of ESCAPE, which was established in Puerto Rico in 1983.
“Uniting in efforts like this helps us find and identify the tools to continue helping children who need us so much,” she added.
The event brought together labor law lawyers Jorge Pizarro García, Alfredo Hopgood-Jovet, Víctor Rivera-Hernández, Yldefonso López-Morales and Reynaldo Quintana-La Torre, who were joined by human resources specialist Wanda Piña-Ramírez. This year’s event featured a special panel with Supreme Court judges Maite Oronoz-Rodríguez and Maritere Colón-Domínguez.
Rivera-Hernández opened the event discussing the topic of sexual harassment in the workplace and said, among other comments, that “sexual harassment cases in the workplace increase and increase every day in number, incidence and intensity, and are aired more regularly in the administrative forums and in the judicial forum.”
“The need for ongoing education and in-depth training on sexual harassment matters is urgent; from the point of view of human dignity, respect and personal and public ethics; and the need for an innovative model of organizational development, human resources and labor relations, which considers the obligation not to tolerate sexual harassment in the workplace,” said Rivera-Hernández, a former Puerto Rico Labor Secretary.
Meanwhile, Quintana-La Torre spoke about effective discipline for difficult employees, noting that, “Often, companies prefer to ignore problematic employees. Those who apply this rule hope that the problem will go away on its own or they remove them from their environment, transferring the employee to another division of the department. Not addressing the situation is the wrong approach to what will most likely become a serious problem.”
During her turn, Piña-Ramírez discussed the topic of “To Evaluate or Not to Evaluate: The New Dilemma of Human Resources,” during which she said 81% of leaders are changing the performance evaluation system and that less than a fifth of human resources leaders believe that the current system is working effectively.
Other sessions included a discussion of dress codes in the face of diversity, headed by Hopgood-Jovet, and a presentation by Pizarro-García and López-Morales on leadership and legal risk in the era of artificial intelligence, metaverse, fabricated content such as deepfakes and the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
