HR Isn't Stopping Workplace Sexual Harassment - The Atlantic - 0 views
-
If HR is such a vital component of American business, its tentacles reaching deeply into many spheres of employees’ work lives, how did it miss the kind of sexual harassment at the center of the #MeToo movement? And given that it did, why are companies still putting so much faith in HR
-
The simple and unpalatable truth is that HR isn’t bad at dealing with sexual harassment. HR is actually very good at it.
-
On The Office, Michael Scott once said of Toby, the Dunder Mifflin HR rep: “If I had a gun with two bullets, and I was in a room with Hitler, bin Laden, and Toby, I would shoot Toby twice.”
- ...9 more annotations...
-
Fairly or not, HR is seen as the division of the company that slows things down, generates endless memos, meddles in employees’ personal business, holds compulsory “trainings,” and ruins any fun and spirit-lifting thing employees come up with
-
the real reason many workers don’t love human resources is that while the department often presents itself as functioning like a union—the open door for worker complaints, the updates on valuable new benefits—it is not a union
-
should the economy change, or should management decide to go in another direction, HR can just as quickly become assassin as friend
-
What HR is actually responsible for—one of the central ways the department “adds value” to a company—is serving as the first line of defense against a sexual-harassment lawsuit
-
The task force had been charged with determining how much progress the country had made since that historic decision. Its finding: very little. “Much of the training done over the last 30 years has not worked as a prevention tool,” the task force found. That’s an incredible statement—three decades of failure.
-
It reveals that sexual harassment is “widespread” and “persistent,” and that 85 percent of workers who are harassed never report it. It found that employees are much more likely to come up with their own solution—such as avoiding the harasser, downplaying the harassment, or simply enduring it—than to seek help from HR. They are far more likely to ask a family member or co-worker for advice than to file a complaint, because they fear that they will face repercussions if they do.
-
This is why all of that training—the videos and online courses and worksheets—seems so useless: because it’s designed to serve as a defense against an employment lawsuit. The task force cited a study that found “no evidence that the training affected the frequency of sexual harassment experienced by the women in the workplace.” The task force also said that HR trainings and procedures are “too focused on protecting the employer from liability,” and not focused enough on ending the problem.
-
Most of the time, if the man is truly important to the company, the case is quickly whisked out of HR’s hands, the investigation delivered to lawyers and the final decision rendered by executives. These executives are under no legal imperative to terminate an alleged offender or even to enforce a particular sanction, only to ensure that the woman who made the report is safe in the future.
-
there is only one way to eradicate harassment from a workplace: by creating a climate and culture that starts at the very top of the company and establishes that harassment is not tolerated and will be punished severely. Middle managers can’t change the culture of a company;