Things you should know: workplace misconduct reporting is getting a shake up
For victims of workplace discrimination and harassment, the process of reporting misconduct can be as destabilizing as the misconduct itself. As much was true in our own experiences, and we know it to be true for the reported 75 percent of harassment victims who faced retaliation after speaking up.
Now, one company is trying to make misconduct reporting suck a whole lot less. Through new technology and a new understanding of how to change company culture, Vault Platform is giving employees the tools to (safely) speak up, and employers the ability to listen.
Even more, Vault co-founder Neta Meidav is channeling her own experience after having been failed by inadequate reporting processes to report her own incident. We sat down with Neta to get her take on what’s wrong with the compliance status quo, what Vault can do that traditional reporting processes can’t, and her hopes for changing company culture for the better.
Simone: Why does the process for reporting discrimination and harassment at work need to change?
In the early days of the #MeToo campaign, one of the things we realized is that harassment is far more common than we all knew. There’s a behavioral problem, but it’s being emphasized by an underlying problem: reporting systems are fundamentally broken. People don’t use them, they provide zero value to the employee and zero value to the employer. The companies that made it into the headlines for all the wrong reasons each had an anonymous hotline in place, but people still felt like they couldn’t come forward.
The current reporting tools are not making workplace discrimination any better, in fact they’re making it worse.
We decided to dig deeper into the problem and we realized that there’s a real deficiency of trust in the workplace today. That’s what we’re trying to fix with our technology.
The current reporting tools are not making workplace discrimination any better, in fact they’re making it worse. In speaking to dozens of chief HR and chief compliance officers, we found they chose reporting tools off of a checklist corresponding to the size of their company. Everyone knows they provide very little value, everyone knows very few people would actually use the anonymous hotline, but a better solution didn’t exist.
Simone: What does Vault do that traditional reporting processes can’t?
When we created Vault, we reverse-engineered solutions to put the employee at the very center, thinking about reporting from the employee perspective rather from the perspective of the employer.
Our research found that people, especially women, feel much more empowered reporting as a group (even though it requires them to identify themselves) rather than reporting anonymously or by any other method.
The platform is framed around two major concepts. The first is the idea of a time-stamped diary that exists on every employee’s private device. Neither the employer nor anyone else has access to the diary, but when the time is right the employee can open up that record to their employer. The beauty there is that there are different ways of doing that: you’re able to choose who the report gets sent to, for example. The second concept is what we’re calling “GoTogether.” This allows you to come forward under the condition you’re not the first or only person raising that complaint. Our research found that people, especially women, feel much more empowered reporting as a group (even though it requires them to identify themselves) rather than reporting anonymously or by any other method.
Our goal is to bring trust back into the workplace — we don’t want you to trust a third party, we don’t want you to trust a call center somewhere at a different company, we want you to trust your workplace.
Simone: To what extent is Vault a proactive rather than merely a reactive measure? Why is that important?
We believe that once a company puts Vault in place, they will probably see an increase in reporting in the first year or two. That’s actually a positive sign showing that our tech enables picking these things up and creates an environment that helps companies mitigate the risk of abuses of power. More reporting also means trust is increasing.
But in a year or two, you want to see a decline, and that decline will prove there is actually a shift in behavior. With tech like Vault in place, Harvey Weinstein cannot go ahead and ‘Weinstein’ people because he knows he can be caught. No matter how far removed the employees who are being harassed or discriminated against are from one another, the technology will connect the dots.
Simone: How have your own experiences motivated you to do this work?
Vault was created on the back of a personal experience at my first-ever job as an adult fresh out of university. I was harassed via text, and I didn’t report the experience. I left. I didn’t even consider reporting it. I felt alone, I felt in complete darkness. I was worried that this powerful man would crush my career before it even started.I didn’t even store those text messages anywhere. (This was back before iPhones and the Cloud.)
I found out a few months later that a colleague of mine was also being harassed by this same person after she called me out of the blue. If I had known I wasn’t the only one at the time it would have changed everything because we would have reported it together.
Fast forward twelve years to a conversation between my husband and I around the kitchen table. We had just heard about #MeToo, and he asked me if I would have done something differently. (You know you married well when your husband says, “We need to do something about sexual harassment.”)
I found myself in a new country because of this experience, my life really took a different turn, and then I found out a few months later that a colleague of mine was also being harassed by this same person after she called me out of the blue. If I had known I wasn’t the only one at the time it would have changed everything because we would have reported it together. I also would have saved those messages: Even if I wanted to go back and do something today, I wouldn’t be able to because I wouldn’t have any of the evidence.
Simone: How does Vault help employees that don’t have hard evidence of discrimination/bullying/harassment?
Sometimes, especially with issues like bullying and with sexual harassment, it’s the micro-aggressions, the things that happen over time that tell the real story, and we’ve created our diary experience around that idea. The diary is made up of events — a harassment report can be a single event, but it can also be a series of ongoing events.
The diary allows for that ongoing event to be captured and reported, taking into account different thresholds for reporting.
For example, if someone makes a comment to you that you don’t feel right about, you might not be inclined to report that right away. But with the diary, you can have a time-stamped, encrypted record. Then, if suddenly you look into your personal vault and see you’ve been on the receiving end of five instances of questionable behavior in the past month, that might be enough for you to go and report. The diary allows for that ongoing event to be captured and reported, taking into account different thresholds for reporting. There will be plenty of people who will be using Vault and will never submit a report because just having that diary is enough. And other people will report on a single event, and we wanted a tool that caters to all possibilities.
Simone: To what extent is Vault able to shape how employers respond to a claim?
We steer clear from providing advice and counseling and consulting because thats not our strength. We are a reporting app, we are a new channel of communication between HR and their people, we certainly do not replace the human response and human investigation, but we do empower it. There’s a whole part of the platform dedicated to tracking the connection between the employee and HR.
I would hope that Vault will become a standard tool in any HR toolkit in the future, and as we do, we will capture those who not perform very well and make them improve by making themselves accountable to their people.
And as an employee, you get to know what is happening with your submission — has it been read? What is the resolution? You get that kind of tracking which is improving your experience as an employee within that space. Of course, we don’t replace the investigation itself. If there’s a crappy HR department it’s out of our hands really as a company because we do not assume the role of being an advisor to them.
Those who come to us are usually visionaries and they will be the first ones to offer this tool to their employees because they are very proud of the way they respond to these things. I would hope that Vault will become a standard tool in any HR toolkit in the future, and as we do, we will capture those who not perform very well and make them improve by making themselves accountable to their people.
Thank you Neta for sharing your thoughts and experiences and for all of your work in this space .
