On harassment and discrimination in organizations

Once, at one of the companies I worked for, the managers wanted to create an “Aggression Report Form”. That way, these situations - which were becoming recurrent in meetings - could be handled formally and resolved through yet another bureaucratic management process. What they didn’t realize was that this way of trying to “solve” the problem took aggression for granted as something natural in the workplace, rather than as a side effect of a toxic management model.

I see a similar movement happening around cases of harassment and discrimination in organizations, a problem that already affects about 25% of workers worldwide, according to the survey “Experiences of violence and harassment at work: A global first survey” by ILO-Lloyd’s Register Foundation-Gallup.

Creating a safe communication channel for reports (such as an anonymous form) or a support service (such as an ombudsman’s office or psychological counseling) to try to remedy the problem of harassment and discrimination at work is the least an organization needs to do to show interest in, and empathy for, people’s suffering.

Creating guidance and awareness programs on these topics, as well as providing training on neutral language, nonviolent communication, emotional intelligence and moral and ethical conduct at work, helps raise awareness and teach new techniques and tools so that people can better face or avoid situations related to these topics.

But that’s not enough. It’s only the starting point.

We need to ask what the pre-existing conditions in the organization that encourage and reinforce harassment and discrimination at work are. For example:

1. A lack of transparency around financial information supports discrimination and the pay gap between men and women.
2. Fixed hierarchies, based on interests and power, create many social situations where harassment (of every kind) becomes a tool for management, negotiation and blackmail. This same kind of hierarchy creates the structures that form the basis for discrimination at work.
3. Management practices that directly connect bosses and subordinates (such as one-on-one feedback, individual performance reviews, promotions and raises) can also be structural drivers of discrimination and harassment.
4. The way the organization advertises its openings and runs its hiring processes can hurt applications and hiring of women and of people who would broaden human diversity, leaving untouched the structures that favor discrimination and harassment.

Thinking this way, you could bring the following question to the people in your company: How do our management model, our organizational structure, our people management practices, and our work rules and processes encourage or discourage situations of discrimination and harassment?

Maybe this is the most important question if we want to truly solve this huge problem in organizations.