The Drama-Free Workplace

How You Can Prevent Unconscious Bias, Sexual Harassment, Ethics Lapses, and Inspire a Healthy Culture

Patti Perez

• Editorial: Wiley
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781119546443
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Business
• Categoría: Decision Making

Eliminate sexual harassment, unconscious bias, ethical lapses and other HR nightmares!

Companies spend millions on legal compliance training and initiatives to eliminate workplace drama and the resulting low morale and lawsuits, but don't always get the results they want. Most organizations understand that simply checking legal compliance boxes around sexual harassment, bias, etc. isn't enough, but are at a loss on how to implement solutions, especially in today's post-#MeToo world.

Patti Perez is an attorney, HR expert, trainer, and former state regulator, who has conducted over 1, 200 workplace investigations. In this unique book, she explains the secret to avoiding all forms of drama, legal exposure, and low morale: A healthy workplace culture. Patti combines the lessons learned from 25 years of professional experience with robust data from behavioral science research to debunk common myths, including the belief that a focus on legal compliance leads to a healthy workplace culture. (In fact, it increases the likelihood of getting sued).

The Drama-Free Workplace includes a section with easy-to-understand causes, effects and solutions to problems related to:

• Sexual harassment
• Bias and diversity
• Ethics lapses

The book also includes helpful information on:

• Becoming an organization that values and practices fearlessness, fairness and freedom
• Anticipating situations that give rise to drama, with detailed advice on how to prevent it from happening
• Using emotional intelligence to communicate more precisely and persuasively about sensitive, controversial topics in the workplace

Finally, the book's DIY section guides companies on how to:

• draft and enforce helpful policies (that employees will actually read and *want* to follow)
• design and deliver powerful and effective training programs
• investigate and resolve claims of sexual harassment and other types of misconduct.

Together, these practical tools will help all your employees feel valued and motivated, and keep drama, disengagement, and lawsuits, away.

PART I
Diagnosis Drama: What You Can Do to Identify, Prevent, and Fix Workplace Drama

1
How to Blow Up an Organization (and Rise from the Ashes)

Chances are, you encounter drama in your workplace on a daily basis. My guess is that if you had a nickel for every time someone asked for advice because they’d been “harassed at work” or they have to deal with an employee who is “gaming the system,” well, you’d have lots of nickels.

Some of the drama is subtle and nuanced, related more to perception than the actual facts of the story. Other times the stories you hear are blatant and in your face. These are the stories that make you cringe and ask yourself, “Did she really do that?”

The skills required to address these situations vary, but regardless of where the drama falls on the intensity spectrum, you need to do everything in your power to manage, if not eliminate, it. Will it really take blowing up your organization to identify, prevent, and fix workplace drama? Yes (but not literally!).

#WorkplaceDrama: Identifying Problematic Behavior

Workplace drama takes many forms, but all drama is rooted in conflict and heightened emotions. The drama might involve just a few people (at least initially). But like a progressive disease, the drama spreads if it isn’t dealt with swiftly and effectively. And too often unchecked drama ends up infecting an entire department, division, or company. Identifying the problem is vital to ultimately figuring out how to prevent it and solve it.

So how does drama manifest itself at work? Here’s a partial list:

• “Harassment.” This word is in quotes for a reason; it’s a word that is misunderstood and therefore misused. Too often, people use the term to describe behavior that is annoying or bothersome. While that is the dictionary definition of “harassment,” the legal meaning is quite different. More than likely, you’ve had this conversation before. You’ve had to explain this distinction between the layman’s definition and the legal definition, though hopefully you’ve made it clear that even behavior that is “less than” illegal is nonetheless problematic and needs to be addressed. Harassing conduct takes many forms and involves the entire gamut of personal characteristics, but the type of workplace harassment that is most often discussed remains sexual harassment. And of course, in the post-#MeToo world, it’s taken on an additional urgency. In many instances, an employee complaining about “harassment” is actually referring to disrespectful, rude, or demeaning conduct, and, in more severe cases, workplace bullying. Having a respectful and civil workplace environment is vital to having a truly healthy workplace culture, but a problem can’t be fixed if it is imprecisely stated. It requires a new plan and it is one of many ways that a company needs to blow up before it can rebuild.

Harassment: It’s important to distinguish between exposure to annoying or bothersome behavior (the dictionary definition of harassment) and unlawful harassment, which involves a protected category and must meet other legal requirements, including unwelcomeness and either severity or pervasiveness. (See Chapter 3.)

• Bias – conscious and unconscious. You’ve seen bias, or at least allegations of it, every day, right? It may take the form of a boss who is playing favorites, inaccurately describing someone’s performance, or making judgmental comments. Undoubtedly, you’ve also had discussions about unconscious bias—whether it involves African-Americans who are arrested for waiting for a friend at a coffee shop or women who say they experience “mansplaining” at meetings. The reality of unconscious bias and the ways in which it affects our decision-making is well chronicled, even if the average employee still doesn’t understand it completely.

I’ll use the term “unconscious bias” throughout this book. Unconscious biases are social stereotypes about certain groups of people that individuals form outside their own conscious awareness. Sometimes the term “implicit bias” is used instead of unconscious bias, particularly by academics. Implicit bias refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. (For more, see Chapter 3.)

• Perceptions of unfairness. “I work just as hard as Sarah, but Joe always gives her a higher rating and a higher raise.” “I just wish I knew the rules of the game so I could succeed at this company.” “They tell us that there is a procedure to deal with this issue, but we all know rules are bent if you have the right title.” “I honestly have no idea why my boss dislikes me and treats me so disrespectfully.” Whether these examples ultimately uncover actual unfairness ends up being of little consequence. If employees have a reasonable perception that an individual or “the company” is treating them unfairly, you have workplace drama you need to deal with. (More on this in Chapter 5.)
• Ethical lapses. Many examples of ethical lapses involve a lack of thought and analysis. While there are certainly examples of employees embezzling money or committing other blatently fraudulent acts, in many instances the ethical lapse is an employee receiving a gift from a vendor, a committee leader advocating for his friend’s company during an RFP process, or a manager going against policy and hiring someone without going through the pre-established procedure. Regardless of whether the conduct is purposeful or is due to laziness, ethical blunders, and how the company deals with them, are a common source of drama at work. (More in Chapter 4.)

There are, of course, many other examples of workplace strife, but these examples of drama at work are the ones we see most often.

Root Causes of Workplace Drama

Just as important as identifying and recognizing drama (preferably early, when it can still be easily addressed), is recognizing its root causes. Any one of these examples—not to mention a combination of them—has the potential to devastate your company.

1. Inauthentic leadership: A lack of authenticity creates or perpetuates a belief that management is hypocritical, that they only talk the talk but don’t walk the walk. In this environment, employees lose enthusiasm for their jobs, passion for what the company represents, and, most dangerous, they lose trust.
2. Problem-solving deficit: A lack of authenticity leads to inconsistency, usually seen in the form of the failure to implement solutions in an even-handed way. Over time, this creates actual unfairness (and also creates a strong perception of a lack of workplace justice).
3. Persistent confusion: Unfair or illegal?: Repeated inconsistency in dealing with conflict (e.g., ignoring misconduct, conducting sham investigations into claims of misconduct, uneven distribution of consequences when misconduct is proven) not only leads to the erosion of trust, but it also increases the probability that employees will perceive any level of misconduct not only as unfair, but also as illegal. This increases the chance that they will make internal or external claims of legal violations. If made internally, the company must go down the compliance route and conduct a formal workplace investigation. Or the employee might choose to file a lawsuit. And in today’s social media–filled world there is another choice. An employee’s grievance could end up on a blog, an employer review website, a social media site, or as an exposé on the front page of a national newspaper. Yesterday’s biggest workplace fear might have been an employment lawsuit. Today, brand value is more easily lost with one press of a button . . . a button that says “post.”

Imprecise use of legal terms

Similar to the misunderstanding about the term “harassment,” employees (including managers) also use the terms “hostile work environment,” “discrimination,” and “retaliation” imprecisely. Each of these are legal terms of art; an employee must establish several specific elements to prove any of these legal violations. But these terms are often used in the workplace to point to behavior that is irritating, biased, or vindictive. Use of precise language—which then leads to an appropriate corporate reaction and resolution—is vital. But make no mistake, this is a two-way street. Just as it is important for employees to learn to precisely report their concerns, it is equally important that employers, especially managers and HR prof...