Category: Blog

Relationships Fail

I’ve been a bit of a Donna Downer over the past two weeks.  With 15 harassment/respectful workplace training sessions, I have repeatedly explained the following:

Relationships fail at an alarming rate.  Think of all the relationships you suffer through before you get married.  Could be a lot, right?  Then, only 50 percent of marriages last.  So if you start a relationship at work, it might not last.  Are you ready for that?

Fifteen percent of relationships start at work.  This means that employers – and probably more than a few HR folk – wring their hands over what could happen with a relationship at work.  They may be worried about harassment, favoritism, and the distraction.  But they are also worried about the break-up.  Will the couple be professional?  Will they be petty?  Will their harassment and retaliation policies be invoked?  There are all sorts of worry.  Here’s what I’d like us to worry about.

Professionalism.  When we’re dating someone, we’re not professional.  We don’t keep physical contact to handshakes.  We may (overly) use emojis in emails and messages.  We share secrets, gossip, and vent about work stuff with our significant others.  These are all examples of behavior that is rarely “professional.”

Confidentiality.  Being in a relationship at work may mean we’re sharing sensitive and confidential information with someone who should not have the information.  If one of the couple is in payroll, processing bonus checks before bonuses are announced and shares what his partner is going to get before the announcement, this is a problem.  When we’re in the relationship, we believe we could trust our partner, yet people make mistakes.  Information goes farther than it should.  People find out about decisions before we’re ready to share them and

Harassment.  When couples get too touchy-feely in the workplace, others are uncomfortable.  As Black Widow once told Captain America, “Public displays of affection make people uncomfortable.”  When others are uncomfortable, harassment policies come into play.  It is not unusual to see another employee complain of harassment, especially when they believe (rightly or not) that favoritism is rearing its ugly head.

Chain of command.  When a relationship involves a manager and one of her employees, everything gets more complicated.  There will be allegations of favoritism.  If (when) the couple is in conflict with each other, it may (will) affect their working relationship.  Some of my clients prohibit these kinds of relationships, and I don’t blame them.  We may change the reporting structure, transfer one to a different shift or department.  The risks here given the imbalance of power are significant.

With those concerns, some employers resort to love contracts.  Please don’t.  Love contracts give the appearance that the employer is dictating the terms and conditions of the romance.  And, with the piece of paper, we look even more like we’re heavily monitoring the relationship.  Not a good look.  That said, HR and a manager can certainly have a conversation with the couple about their responsibilities to be professional and avoid the appearance of conflicts of interests.  This conversation should happen.  It even should be documented by HR, but please don’t have a love contract signed by the couple.  We want to be human at work, not overlords.

Despite some of the content of this post, I’m a huge fan of love.  We go into love with big eyes, big hearts, and bushy tails – as it should be.  When that love happens at work, there’s a new level of complexity where we have to be careful.  Call your friendly neighborhood employment attorney.

 

Photo by Kseniya Petukhova on Unsplash

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Man-Bashing Training

Question:  Do we vilify men in harassment training?   

Think about that for a moment.  Do we use more man-on-woman examples?  (Probably.)  Do we need to change this?  Yes.  Harassment training is for everybody because everybody could harass.  According to a recent poll, one in seven men has experienced harassment at work. So, we can’t ignore men and their experiences just because so many women have similar experiences.

It is possible (and maybe even likely) that we’ve created an environment surrounding harassment training that we’ve alienated men or have come across as attacking them.  If this is the case, we should be criticized.  And, we should do better.  Here’s how I think we can do this:

Know our audience.  Every training should be customized to the workplace.  If the scenarios don’t feel real, the training won’t have an impact.  Because we have men in our workplaces, we can’t exclude their experience (and fear) from our training.  We should address it, and give a workable framework on what we expect from them.

Start with respect.  Often in trainings, I hear the statement, “I can’t even compliment a woman anymore.”  This comment comes from a man, usually over 40, who is sitting with his arms crossed, angry that he even needs to be in the room.  I turn to him and say, “There’s a difference between ‘That dress is very nice on you’ and ‘That dress hugs you in all the right ways.’”  He nods, and if I’m lucky, he chuckles a bit.  I then say, “We’re here to talk about that difference.”  That difference is respect.

For all of you labor lawyers cringing at this, listen up!  We live in a society where respect is under a near constant barrage.  We can’t operate in workplaces where respect and integrity aren’t at the core of what we are.  Without respect, we don’t get innovation.  So, we should make respect the cornerstone of our training. Our employees want respect.  They expect and deserve respect.  Starting our training talking about respect is what we must do.  If every conversation was respectful, we wouldn’t have harassment.

Have diverse examples.  Women-on-women harassment happens.  Men-on-men harassment happens.  So, we should have diverse examples.  Some of my best examples – examples that result in the most discussion – are man-on-man and woman-on-man.  We want to have a discussion and a bit of uncomfortableness.  Because we learn when we experience and are at least a bit uncomfortable, the discussion has any chance to really make a difference.

Use the whole scale of harassment.  Include examples of calling someone “sweetheart” or “man candy.”  Talk about staring, dirty jokes, and racial epithets.  You can talk about kissing, hugging, and even assault too, but ignoring the subtle stuff ignores where most harassment starts.  We don’t want this.

Ask, “what would you do?”  We should put our employees in the uncomfortable position of asking them what they would do.  You may be surprised by the responses.  Then, we should explain what we want them to do.  We don’t have to change their personalities to get between a harasser and his/her victim, but we should at least explain who we want them to tell.

Harassment training should mirror the tone of our workplaces.  It should set expectations and be meaningful for employees and managers.  It should make our employees contemplate their conduct without making them feel bad.

One more point:  Ladies, we don’t get to objectify men at work.  I’ve heard the argument that men have objectified women for a long time, so women should get to objectify men as a matter of fairness or even that they like it (uff da).  But like India has to grow green while we polluted for decades, we have to do the right thing.  We can’t objectify them either.  Enjoy a Magic Mike movie, but you can’t bring the poster into the office.  Ok?

This evening, I get to talk about trends in harassment training.  I’ve very excited (and a more than a bit nervous) about this.  Eliminating man-bashing will be one of the trends along with bystander and civility components, manager focus, and welcomeness elimination.  Any others you think I should talk about?

Photo by Nicholas Green on Unsplash

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