Valentine’s Day and The #MeToo Movement

February 14th is just a few days away. With this come the obligatory annual articles regarding love in the workplace. Valentine’s Day 2018 should be different. With the Harvey Weinstein sexual assault revelations that came out less than six months ago, the Alyssa Milano message that resulted in over 12 million Facebook posts within 24 hours and the fact that The Time Magazine Person of the Year were all of the silence breakers (male and female), the need for major changes in Corporate America is in the air. 

Here are a few statistics from a recent survey:

?     71% of harassment victims did NOT report it to their company.

?     Only 20% stated they feel their company would be supportive if they raised a complaint of inappropriate sexual conduct. This means that 80% do not feel their company would support them.

?     69% of adults think sexual harassment is a major problem in 2017 opposed to only 50% in 1998.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission defines sexual harassment as “unwelcome” sexual advances, requests for sexual favors or other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature when such conduct is made either explicitly or implicitly a term of condition of an individual’s employment, unreasonably interferes with an individual’s work performance or creates an intimidating, hostile or offensive work environment. 

Hmmm. In over 40 years of working in Human Resources, I have never thought of the word “unwelcome” in the definition. Looking at it now, I come to realize that the word gives people the freedom to try. In other words, how do I know it’s unwelcome unless I try? If someone in authority makes a sexual advance toward a subordinate that is unwelcome, then employment relationship has changed forever – even when nothing else happened.

This is where things must change. Corporate policies must state that any sexual advances made by an employee in a management position is inappropriate behavior and grounds for immediate termination. The assumption here is that any and all sexual advances are unwelcome. Likewise, subordinates should never make sexual advances toward their boss. If this happen the boss must turn down the request and speak to HR on what should be done about the employee who made the advance. It’s complicated, but these actions must be taken.

Additionally, many organizations have settled sexual harassment complaints by throwing money at the accuser and making them sign non-disclosure agreements. The result of such actions is a sexual predator gets to keeps his/her job. Fox News also paid about $13 million to five women in exchange for them to not pursue lawsuits and stay quiet about their cases. Then when things finally caught up to Bill O’Reilly he was fired and still walked away with $25 million in severance pay. How did he get away with this? Roger Ailes walked away with $40 million in severance. 

These are just two examples of high level people who were greatly financially rewarded for their horrible behavior. It is happening all over the country. This too has got to stop.

One other area of change is the Alternative Dispute Resolution Agreements many organizations require employees to sign. These agreements state that employees cannot file a lawsuit for wrongdoing by their employer and must go through binding arbitration. This is advantageous to the organizations that have such agreements in that court records are public information whereas the binding arbitration agreements are not.

Change is needed and needed quickly. 

I’d like to see comments on what other ideas you may have. 

Thanks for reading.