How can Employers and Employees Improve the Statistics on Respectful Workplace Violations?
By Sierra Munroe
Sierra is a senior at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona, majoring in Global Security and Intelligence Studies. She is an intern at Verensics for this Summer, and hopes to continue pursuing security after graduation.
Substantiation rates for HR, diversity, and workplace respect violations are lower than most other behavior categories, such as misappropriation of assets or business integrity, but why is this?
NAVEX, which provides governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) services, produces an annual report that evaluates statistics in the aforementioned areas. This includes how many claims were made in that year, how many per category, how that year compares to others, and more. This report is thorough – this year’s edition being 75 pages – and it offers valuable insights into what areas we may need to pay more attention to in years to come. The particular categories that they evaluate are financial reporting, business integrity, diversity & workplace respect, environmental health/safety, misappropriation of assets, and others.
We will focus on incidents categorized as HR, Diversity, and Workplace Respect. All other categories of claims have substantiation rates (defined below) ranging from 43% to 50%, whereas HR, Diversity and Workplace Respect has remained stagnant in the high 30’s for the past few years.
Before we continue, let’s start with some basic term definitions. Substantiation refers to a claim or report that is supported by facts and evidence, also referred to as a substantiated claim. Alternatively, an unsubstantiated claim is determined to be without any factual backing. With those definitions in mind, we will now discuss possible reasons the substantiation rates for claims brought up under HR, Diversity, and Workplace Respect are lower when compared to the other categories. Another thing to keep in mind is, just because there are less substantiated claims within this category does not necessarily indicate if there are less (or more) claims being reported. It just so happens that the category of HR, Diversity, and Workplace Respect claims make up just less than half total claims across all categories, but this is a great example of how correlation does not always equal causation.
When employees feel disrespected by colleagues, these feelings can sometimes be hard to prove. This could be as simple as leaving someone out purposefully. I recently heard of a scenario that illustrates how this can manifest in the real world. In this example, an employee is the new boss of the team he was previously a member on. He decided that, rather than welcoming his replacement and training them how he was supposed to; that he would leave them in the dark. Whether this was to make himself look more effective in his previous role, or just to make the new employee look bad is unclear, but the reality is that he was leaving them out on purpose. However, from the perspective of the junior employee, this claim is difficult to prove. Therefore, this report would be considered unsubstantiated, as the employee making the claim does not have the hard proof needed for it to have factual backing. While this example may seem juvenile and straight-forward, when you consider real-world issues and more levels of nuance, it is easy to see how this can become convoluted and difficult to substantiate.
Another reason that reports under the category of HR, Diversity, and Workplace Respect are more difficult to prove is that these aggressions tend to happen in personal interactions. If an employee is coming forth with a claim regarding misappropriation of funds, it is straightforward for them to pull up a spreadsheet or bank account information to prove how funds were not allocated properly. These claims are objective and can be backed from multiple angles because of the more strict tracking of details. And, unless you plan to equip every member of your company with a body camera 24/7, reports regarding toxic workplace behavior are significantly more difficult to qualify. Even if a colleague said something directly discriminatory to someone else, it usually comes down to one person’s word against the other’s. When people are in a group, they are likely to conform with how everyone else is acting, even forgoing rationality. Therefore, unless everyone is throwing out discriminatory remarks left and right, individuals with disrespectful thoughts are not likely to say something in front of a group, reinstating the idea that it would be the one person’s word against the other’s.
To provide further insight as to why HR, Diversity, and Workplace Respect claims are more difficult to substantiate, and how employers can help improve these statistics, Embry-Riddle’s own Alan Saquella voices his thoughts:
“The discrepancy in the reporting, investigation, and resolution of workplace harassment, policy violations, human resource issues, and matters of diversity and workplace respect, as opposed to insider criminal behavior, is influenced by several key factors,” said Saquella.
In short, he summarizes these key factors as the following: tangible nature of criminal behavior, complexity of HR and diversity issues, organizational responses, and proactive measures and company culture.
Now that we have explored some reasons why these claims are harder to substantiate, what can employers do to help? If you have reason to believe that employees are struggling to substantiate claims, or are neglecting to report their claims due to lack of evidence, you need intelligence to back up your suspicions. One option is to survey your employees. In this method, you can specifically target integrity, bullying, or even just general conduct. Through this questionnaire, HR can narrow down any particular employees that may have risky tendencies and watch for any reports made against these employees from then on. While this does not directly help the affected employee substantiate their claim, it can give them the confidence to come forward while also allowing HR to assess that they are more likely to be telling the truth. Therefore, even if the employee still lacks all evidence, it can further assist HR and other authorities to take the claim seriously and move forward as needed.
Luckily, if you feel this is a path that your company would like to go down to help raise the statistics regarding substantiated claims in this category, Verensics offers Internal Investigations questionnaires that can offer any of the categories mentioned above, along with other categories for a variety of use cases. Organizational culture plays an instrumental role in maintaining an ethical workplace. Providing employees with reliable avenues to report incidents greatly reduces the stigma against filing breaches in the code of ethics or any other workplace incidents they may run into.
Culture starts at the top, and it is of the utmost importance that employees feel seen and cared for, as this leads to not only more productive teams, but a better work experience for employees on every level.
