Imagine you are a manager in attendance at a company-sponsored holiday party and in the spirit of the holiday season you hug a number of co-workers of the opposite or same sex. You have worked with some of them for a long time and others are very new employees.

The following week a complaint regarding your conduct is made to the company’s human resources manager. What happens now regarding you, the complainant and the HR department? The true answer is it all depends–it depends on history, severity, context and perspective, and it depends on the type of action the company takes to respond to the complaint, the result of any investigation and the way you and the company react.