Workplace Retaliation

Last week the Ethics & Compliance Initiative (ECI) released findings from the latest update to our Global Business Ethics Survey (GBES); a longitudinal study of employees that began in 1994. Amidst all the data points, most striking to me were the indicators related to workplace reporting and retaliation. Suffice it to say that there is great news and terrible news at the same time.

Last year, half of all employees in business organizations in the US observed some form of misconduct taking place (33% of employees globally did the same). Eighty-six (86%) percent of those individuals did the right thing; they reported the problem(s) to management. That’s cause for celebration in the ethics & compliance industry, given that we spend our days encouraging employees to come forward when they suspect that wrongdoing is taking place. Creating a “speak-up culture” has become our mantra, and the research shows that we are making progress; reporting has risen 35% over the past two decades. Today more employees tell management about suspected misconduct than ever before.

But don’t pop the bubbly just yet, my friends. There is more to the story.

The majority of those brave employees (79%) who reported wrongdoing to management experienced some form of reprisal for having done so. Globally, the median for retaliation was 61%. Taking into account the percentage of employees who observed misconduct and reported in the first place, that means that a third of the workforce (in the US) experienced retaliation last year. Let me say that again, with emphasis:

Last year a third of employees in the US workforce reported wrongdoing and then experienced harm as their reward.

Even more troubling is the fact that this problem is on the rise, in a big way. Levels of retaliation have increased by 84% over the past two decades. Today more people experience retribution for coming forward to report misconduct than ever before.

The GBES has taught us a lot about retaliation over the years. The following are a few insights:

• Without intervention, reporting and retaliation tend to rise and fall together in every organization. The more people report, the greater the risk that they will experience reprisal for coming forward.
• Most acts of retaliation are social in nature; therefore, they are very difficult to substantiate (e.g. being ignored by peers or excluded from work activity).
• Management is part of the problem. Fifty-five percent of retaliatory acts in 2020 were undertaken by an immediate supervisor or someone else in management.
• Managers are also victims. The higher you rise in an organization, the more likely you are to experience retaliation for reporting.
• The greater the number of people who are involved in an act of misconduct, the more likely it is that retaliation will occur against any individual who alerts management.
• The more frequently misconduct occurs, the more likely it is retaliation will happen if someone reports the situation.

 Another thing that we know is that retaliation has a profound impact on both the employee who reports and the organization overall. Three new problems surface as a result:

1.  At least one additional act of misconduct has taken place (the retaliatory behavior);
2.  A new victim has been created (the employee who reported); and
3.  The retaliatory act seeds an environment that is cancerous to the culture of the organization.

That last point is an important one. We now know that acts of retaliation erode a workplace on a number of levels. For example, in the 2016 update to the GBES, ECI found that employees who experienced retaliation were less likely to be engaged at work, less likely to believe that the organization holds people accountable, less likely to report again, and they were far more likely to be planning to leave the organization. If asked by a colleague for advice about how to handle a problem, employees who experienced retaliation told them not to report.

It stands to reason, then, that this latest finding that retaliation continues to rise is an important alarm. Unless we take action, our organizations are at risk for a silencing effect to grow in our workplace cultures, which in turn allows more misconduct to take place. Therefore, this problem of retaliation is big, and it is urgent.

So what are we to do? That’s the subject of my next article. In the meantime, ECI’s latest Global Business Ethics Survey is available to the public for free. To download your copy, please visit: https://www.ethics.org/gbes.