An interesting ruling out of India brings to light a new question on workplace sexual harassment: should we allow workplace sexual harassment claims to include acts that occur outside the physical workplace? At first glance, this question seems like an attempt at extending workplace policy into personal life, but that is not necessarily the case.

According to the New Delhi High Court, a man can be accused of workplace sexual harassment even in cases where the misconduct has been committed outside the office premises. When I read this, the first thing I thought of was that if that type of logic were applied here in the United States, if I bumped into a female coworker at the club and commented that she looked sexy, I might end up facing a sexual harassment charge.

But as I read further, I realized that this decision has much more to do with the definition of the workplace than it does the expansion of workplace polices into personal life. In India, like in the US, more and more individuals, including senior officials, are conducting business from home or on the road as technological advances continue to make it possible. As such, your workplace may very well be your home office, your hotel room on the road, the location of a video conference, or even your bedroom.

But just because you have your computer in the bedroom does not mean that you can send suggestive text messages to colleagues merely because you are not physically in the office. Just as most of us know that strolling into a video conference out of our home naked is just as bad as showing up to the workplace naked, I would think that most people would also be smart enough not to engage in sexual harassment, regardless of their location.

As a matter of fact, I would even go so far as to suggest that when on the road, as a representative of your company, regardless of whether you are on the clock or not, standard workplace policy should apply. If you happen to be in a hotel bar after working hours and start talking dirty to a woman who doesn’t want to hear it (even if she is not an employee of your company), in my opinion, that woman has been subjected to sexual harassment. Because as a representative of your company, particularly when you are abroad on company business there is (or should be) an assumed mantle of association where employees understand that their actions can be interpreted as standard operating procedure of the company they represent.

The fact is that the traditional definition of the workplace is continuously changing. Gas prices have broken records at an astounding pace this year, and I am sure that the number of individuals that work at least part of the week from home or elsewhere will increase. As such, employees need to be aware that even though a high court in the United States has not yet ruled that sexual harassment claims can include misconduct that occurs outside of the physical address of the office (and to be honest, I am not sure that one hasn’t already done so), sexual harassment, discrimination, and even workplace bullying policies might be extended beyond the office walls on a case by case basis.

Any way you frame it, sexual harassment, whether it happens in a meeting with a coworker at the office or in a bar room gathering of employees after work, is just wrong. The sad thing is that something tells me that in the near future we are going to need a ruling like that of the High Court in New Delhi to keep those fools who don’t have an notion of the word respect from dragging the reputations of good companies through the muck.