One of the biggest issues in today's corporate world is workplace bullying and harassment. Women all over the world are now raising their voice against the long lurking issue in the wake of #MeToo Movement. Following up the Harvey Weinstein scandal, the Weinstein company went through so much backlash and public disgrace that it ultimately filed for bankruptcy last year.
Numerous cases are filed in the court of law every day, and organizations are caught in the turmoil of these million dollar lawsuits because they failed to protect their employees. Even though the company didn’t participate in the acts of individual perpetrators working in it, according to the court of law, it still failed to provide justice to the victim employees. If only they were able to detect and take action against such acts in relevant time, things would be different.
What organizations need nowadays is a means to expose these issues before they ruin the lives of their victims and the people surrounding them. What your company need is a system for its employees to speak freely about these sensitive issues.
1. Let’s consider a case:
One of the employees in your company named Hannah is gradually being bullied by her manager Steve. At first, she thinks she’s being paranoid and ignores the issue, but the situation keeps getting worse. Steve makes numerous passes on Hannah and constantly asks her out on a date. Hannah keeps rejecting him again and again but Steve doesn’t give up. He eventually starts giving her a hard time at work. He keeps giving her unreasonable tasks and undermines her in front of her colleagues. Hannah decides not to confide with the Human Resources or other seniors at the company due to fear of retaliation. As Steve has an exemplary 20 years of service record, Hannah thinks she’s better off enduring the problem alone than coming out with it.
Being stressed from all the harassment, it eventually affects Hannah’s productivity. Steve uses this as an excuse and decides to terminate her employment.
At this moment she ultimately reports his behavior to the management, but the case is overruled as she was being fired from work already.
So after a few months of leaving the organization, Hannah files a lawsuit against your company under False Termination and Sexual Harassment. As the case goes to trial, numerous other women came out with similar issues against the reputed manager Steve. Now your company is facing Million Dollar Lawsuits from multiple women because they couldn’t detect the threat and take action at the right time.
If only your company came to know about such incidents in their workplace earlier, things might have been different. If Hannah ever got to share those issues with the management, some action might have been taken.
Now let's consider the same example but with a little difference. Your company now has YourSafeHub.
So, Hannah keeps receiving inappropriate advances from Steve. Now she knows about his reputation in the company and thinks that confronting him head-on will only invite retaliation. She’s also troubled the fact that the person who is supposed to handle such complaints is the perpetrator himself. In this hypothetical scenario, Hannah has a perfect solution. She files an anonymous complaint against Steve explaining her experiences under his management. YourSafeHub automatically assigns a suitable person to review the ticket and begin an investigation. The complaint was found to be legitimate and Steve is immediately dismissed from work under Inappropriate sexual misconduct.
So with a minor change in scenario, your company was able to rid itself of an internal parasite that would have killed it. They also did not lose a valuable employee or diminish their public image, which means everything nowadays.