Sensing and Responding to Workplace Bullying, Abuse, and Discrimination

The current state of reporting ESG social risks is embryonic. Social Key Risk Indicators are substandard or missing across every sector.

80% of social risks identified from numerous investigations involve Bullying, Abuse, and Discrimination (aka BAD). Yet we all know harming people is unacceptable. Productivity is impaired. Reputation and value destruction can occur at any time through media exposure. Social media has become a fertile ground for reporting Bullying, Abuse, and Discrimination in the workplace. This exposure intensifies when amplified through mainstream news channels. Once this occurs, the Board of an organisation is under enormous pressure to take any necessary action to protect reputations, reduce value destruction, and create confidence that these problems will not occur again. However, in reality, trust can be lost in an instant and hard to regain.

The failings to measure and manage Bullying, Abuse, and Discrimination in the workplace through the lens of risk continues relentlessly. Endless major investigations have led to the commoditisation of platitudes and recommendations. Yet decade after decade these social risks prevail across the workplace in both the public and private sectors. NB The supportive evidence is covered in earlier articles.

Surely, it is time for the chairperson and human resources policy strategists to take note of Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity is when doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Existing Bullying, Abuse, and Discrimination policies and their extensions into procedures and other content contain a rich repository of rules for risk assessment. Yet overwhelming evidence shows that written policies and the way in which they are enacted in practice, are not fit for purpose. The data to identify risks using these rules is often missing or of an inferior quality.

Surprisingly, the ?gap between extensive policy rules and substandard risk data has attracted little attention. Without timely, quality risk data then Bullying, Abuse, and Discrimination problems may well fester in plain sight within the workplace.

The gap between the way rule-based knowledge is applied in practice and the way the data is collected and acted upon requires a different way of thinking.

Strong signals for early interventions require timely, evidence driven risk data. However, the number of layers in a hierarchical organisation impacts signalling. The greater the number of managers and supervisors the more layers are added. The more layers, the more siloism prevails. Unacceptable behaviours typically occur in pockets of silos within layers of hierarchy. The more silos with unacceptable behaviours the more signals are weakened or suppressed altogether. Unacceptable behaviours increase when the span of control has been weakened considerably. It is at this stage the gap between policy intent and practice is a risk.

By their very nature, hierarchies often generate weak or non-existent signals related to social risks that blindside the Board for numerous reasons such as: 1) information filtering; 2) power imbalances; 3) bureaucracy and red-tape; 4) cultural pressures for acceptance of the localised cultural “norm”; 5) ?fear of retaliation; 6) career concerns; 7) social isolationism; 8) moral and ethical dilemmas; 9) emotional and psychological; 10) lack of confidence in the system.

The more hierarchical layers, the longer a signal has to travel and the higher the probability of the signal become weaker or simply disappearing. The more silos that exist within the hierarchical layers the more social risks can be suppressed. A network effect occurs when toxic silos interact with each other beyond the span of conventional command and control. This explains why improving policies, processes, recruitment, and training seldom are sustainable remedies in some organisations. Toxic silos can disappear when the heat intensifies and reappear as the heat disperses.

It is clear that a new way of thinking is required.

Sense-and-Respond is a different model to hierarchical command-and-control. It was first pioneered by the military and more recently by leading corporates such as Tesla and their use of sensors and software. It is a fundamental shift from reactive to proactive management and is the foundation needed to achieve prevention. Using Sense-and-Respond to identify workplace social risks delivers a wide range of benefits such as better talent acquisition and retention, more innovation, protecting reputations and every individual, and automating regulatory compliance and reporting.

Sense-and-Respond only works with advanced technology. This requires the capability to digitalise policies and their rules. The solution needs to be suitable for interaction at scale, whereby everyone is responsible, and everyone has a voice. The data produced from the interactions enables early identification of Bullying, Abuse, and Discrimination. This is achievable through the next generation of technology known as Swarm Intelligence. The aggregation of the interactions with everybody is the means for the emergence of behavioural patterns at any level. By generating strong and timely signals enables a shift from weak lag indicators to evidence-driven lead indicators.

Swarm Intelligence provides the basis for an organisation to adopt a Sense-and-Respond capability for Social Key Risk Indicators. This is the means to address workplace Bullying, Abuse, and Discrimination at scale.?