Free Ontario Workplace Violence & Harassment Policy Template
Every provincially regulated employer in Ontario must have workplace violence and workplace harassment policies, reviewed at least annually, from your first employee. Once six or more workers are regularly employed, they must be in writing and posted. Most templates you'll find are either American, generic enough to be useless, or forty pages of clauses nobody in a fifteen-person company will ever read.
Below is a free, editable template written for small Ontario employers and mapped to the duties in Part III.0.1 of the Occupational Health and Safety Act. Fill in the bracketed sections, get it approved and signed, and post it.
Download the free template
It's provided in RTF so it opens cleanly in Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or Apple Pages. No email required.
What's in it
- Statement of commitment — including the no-reprisal commitment (reprisals against workers are separately prohibited by s. 50 of the OHSA), the clause most often left out.
- Definitions that track the statute — workplace violence, workplace harassment, and the reasonable-management-action carve-out, so ordinary performance management isn't mistaken for harassment.
- Concrete examples, because abstract definitions don't change behaviour.
- Responsibilities split by role — employer, supervisor, worker — since supervisors carry duties personally under the OHSA.
- A reporting path with a named alternate, for the case where the complaint is about the usual contact. The harassment program must give workers someone else to report to when the employer or supervisor is the alleged harasser (OHSA s. 32.0.6(2)(b)).
- What happens after a report, including written notification of results to the worker affected and, if they are your worker, the alleged harasser.
- Domestic violence and risk factors, which the OHSA addresses specifically.
- Version, approval, and review fields — the policy must be reviewed at least annually, and an undated policy can't show that it was.
The policy is only a third of the obligation
This is where most template downloads leave people exposed. Under the OHSA you owe three things, not one:
- The policies — reviewed at least annually, and written and posted in the workplace or electronically where six or more workers are regularly employed.
- The programs behind them — a workplace violence program built on a risk assessment, and a written workplace harassment program for reporting, investigating, and dealing with complaints. A policy statement is not a program.
- Information and instruction for every worker on the policies and programs — including everyone hired after the policy was written.
A signed policy sitting in a shared drive satisfies the first item and nothing else. If someone asks you to demonstrate that your people were actually informed, you need a record showing who received the policy, which version they saw, and when.
Getting the acknowledgment on record
Emailing the document to your team and hoping is how the record ends up unprovable. In Ethica, you upload the finished policy, set the acknowledgment wording, and every employee gets a secure link by email — no account, no password. They read it, click to acknowledge, and the completion is recorded against them with a timestamp and the policy version. Assign it to everyone with a Smart Assignment and new hires get it automatically, and reminders chase anyone who hasn't responded.
If you'd rather not start from a blank page at all, Ethica's Ontario workplace violence and harassment course launches with a ready-to-send version of this policy in your organization's name, so you can swap in your own version whenever it's ready.
Not sure which other Ontario duties apply to a business your size? Answer three questions and find out.
This template and this page are general information, not legal advice. Ethica is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Government of Ontario. Adapt the policy to your workplace and confirm your obligations against the current text of the legislation.