How to Prevent Your Employees from Saying #MeToo

How to Prevent Your Employees from Saying #MeToo
by Tina DePietro

The past few years have shown a mass media uprising against sexual harassment, largely through the #MeToo movement. Research has supported the stereotype of harassers as males with authoritative power over their victims. For organizations, this places a spotlight on male managers and executives, specifically, as they have hierarchical dominance over their subordinates. In this climate, it is vital that organizations recognize that sexual harassment is a prominent issue with serious negative consequences that can result from a failure to respond to prevent it.

What is sexual harassment?

Sexual harassment in the workplace occurs when an employee receives unwanted sexual attention from co-workers, supervisors, clients, or anyone else that they interact with in their work environment. There are two types of sexual harassment: quid pro quo and hostile work environment.

Quid pro quo sexual harassment occurs when the harasser prevents the target from advancing in their career following the target’s opposition to their advances. A hostile work environment is typically formed by more indirect factors, such as an unhealthy or uncomfortable atmosphere in the workplace created by other employees.

How does sexual harassment affect the workplace?

Individuals who fall victim to sexual harassment in the workplace may experience a multitude of negative effects following the harassment, such as hindered psychological health, physical health, and job performance and satisfaction. In addition to the negative effects that sexual harassment can have on the individual target, organizations may be hurt by these acts due to litigation costs, raised insurance fees, and a wounded reputation.

How can your organization prevent it?

Organizational Policies

It is essential for organizations to have a policy against sexual harassment. Furthermore, it is important that organizations make this policy, as well as their reporting procedure, incredibly clear and visible to their employees. This can be accomplished by posting reminders of policies and procedures around the workplace through mediums such as awareness posters.  However, this alone cannot prevent sexual harassment.

Supervisor Attitudes and Actions

Supervisors play a key role in the establishment of workplace norms, which contributes to whether the environment mitigates sexual harassment. Supervisors must take a strong stance against sexual harassment and any behaviors that promote its allowance. This is shown mainly through their reactions to incident reports. A supportive manager will take complaints seriously, investigate them thoroughly, maintain an appropriate level of confidentiality throughout the case, treat the complainant with compassion and reverence, and apply just penalties.

Outside of their response to allegations, it is also imperative that supervisors do not participate in off-color jokes and gestures that make employees feel uncomfortable. Supervisory attitudes toward inappropriate behaviors set the standard for their subordinates. If a supervisor shuts down these behaviors reasonably and respectfully, they can help to deter harassers as they would be deviating from the group’s healthy norms.

Training

It is unreasonable to expect employees to be all-knowing when it comes to sexual harassment if they have not received proper training on the issue. Training programs can provide employees with the proper tools they need to identify, report it, and prevent sexual harassment in the workplace. One important feature of an effective training program is its applicability to the world outside of the classroom.

The content learned through training must be reinforced through practice. Managers should hold meetings after the training to allow employees to apply the knowledge they learned by working through role-play scenarios or simply discussing what they learned and why it is important.

Assessment

To measure the degree that sexual harassment is an issue in an organization, companies should regularly assess their employees. Specifically, employee perceptions of its prevalence (e.g., whether they’ve seen co-workers engage in it),  as well as their attitudes toward sexual behaviors in the workplace (e.g., whether it’s tolerated and how well the organization takes steps to prevent and respond to sexual harassment in the workplace), should be measured.

Analyzing the results of surveys that evaluate these factors can provide diagnostic information that allows organizations to target their problem areas and implement strategies to combat them. For example, if it is clear that employees in a particular department are experiencing high levels of sexual harassment, an organization can further investigate factors such as the department’s gender ratio, hierarchical structure, and cultural norms. It is also important to keep in mind that low reporting is not always a good thing. It may indicate that respondents do not trust the organization to keep their answers confidential or that they won’t result in some form of reprisal.

To make respondents more comfortable in answering honestly to sensitive questions, organizations should take precautions in protecting the data obtained from sexual harassment surveys. Employee responses can be kept confidential by assigning them an ID number that does not link their responses to their name.

One way that organizations can assist researchers in their shared goal of protecting employees is by providing them with these statistics. This way, researchers can compare attitudes, behaviors, and environmental factors across organizations and identify commonalities that contribute to higher prevalence rates. Detecting these common causes would make it much easier for researchers to study solutions that can directly counteract them.

Final Thoughts

Organizations must place high importance on the prevention of sexual harassment. A healthy and safe workplace is a productive and successful workplace. There are various ways that organizations can establish these positive cultures. In doing so, it is crucial that they communicate with researchers regarding their challenges and successes in order to allow for the development of effective prevention strategies.

Tina DePietro is a graduate student at Florida Institute of Technology, working towards a Master's degree focused in Industrial/Organizational Psychology. She is also an active member of the Florida Tech SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management) chapter. Contact Tina at cdepietro2015@my.fit.edu.

References:

Harned, Ormerod, Palmieri, Collinsworth, & Reed, 2002
Lim & Cortina, 2005
McDonald, 2012
Hersch, 2018
Jex & Britt, 2014
Popovich & Warren, 2010
Pryor, 1985
Butler & Chung-Yang, 2011
Newman, Jackson, & Baker, 2003
Medeiros & Griffith, 2019
Bell, Quick, & Cycyota, 2002