HR and Harassment Training Don’t Work, and Everyone Knows
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:
You’re scrolling your feed and and see an exposé — another one — about sexual harassment at a game company. A studio portrayed as a dream workplace has a hidden culture where bosses look the other way from harassment, or even participate in it themselves. “Star” employees know that they’re considered irreplaceable and hurt others with impunity. The story details years of silence, workers of color facing racist comments, victims being driven out of the industry, etc. etc. etc. etc.
The details change, but it’s always the same song.
Which got me thinking, why? It’s easy to be pessimistic or essentialist, and many leave it at “you can’t stop abusers from being who they are.” But even if the bleakest predictions are true, why are management’s responses to abuse so consistently ineffectual in the same ways? Even if you can’t prevent 100% of harassment, why are companies and HR departments inept at assisting (or even hostile towards!) the survivors who do come forward?
With such consistent patterns, you’d wonder why nobody’s studied this scientifically. Well, as it turns out? They did.
The Hard Data on Harassment
In 2016, the US Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) published their findings on workplace harassment across sex, race, sexual orientation, religion, and disability. The report is, in my personal estimation, damning.
Researchers found that workplace sexual harassment is an enduring problem, and often goes under-reported. They said that “we learned that anywhere from 25% to 85% of women report having experienced sexual harassment in the workplace.” But why the wide variance?
One factor is that when subjects were asked if they had experienced “sexual harassment” — without the term being defined — about 25% answered affirmatively. But when asked if they’d experienced any of the specific experiences that make up harassment, affirmative answers skyrocketed to 60% to 75% of respondents.
Using national surveys, the task force found that sexual and sex-based harassment get the most academic attention by far, but harassment on the axes of race, sexual orientation, religion, and disability were all significantly under-studied. The report also notes that people with intersecting identities are more likely to experience multiple forms of harassment, meaning that the most vulnerable workers are somehow the least represented in our collective scientific understanding of harassment.
The report is even more damning in its findings on prevention efforts; “much of the training done over the last 30 years has not worked as a prevention tool — it’s been too focused on simply avoiding legal liability.” Despite Supreme Court precedents that insulate companies from legal fault if they have harassment training programs, there is not nearly enough empirical evidence to indicate that these programs actually prevent harassment.
We can put it more simply: HR’s anti-harassment training is a legal fig leaf. It lets companies off the hook in court, without their having to stoop so far as actually protecting their workers.
Abundant Problems, Unimaginative Solutions
This EEOC report gets referenced a lot, and for good reason: it is a concrete government document that highlights just how little has changed when it comes to harassment. But few articles citing the report examine its suggested solutions. We did, and found that most of them demonstrate a fundamental lack of imagination. At worst, the report seems willfully ignorant about workplace power dynamics.
First, the report’s recommendations are almost solely directed at management. Paragraph after paragraph gives advice for what management can do, while virtually nothing is directed at individuals experiencing harassment. Nor does the commission address rank-and-file workers who want to improve their workplaces.
One of the few actions the report does suggest to workers is inviting researchers into their workplace to address research blind spots. But the paper seemingly ignores that workers don’t, with scant exception, own their office building or the company’s capital. And their boss, who does own those things, may not be interested in inviting researchers to study their bad workplace conditions.
That’s not to say it’s impossible for workers to win such a concession — but the need for a concession at all implies antagonism and a need for leverage.
Directing anti-harassment advice to management is a catch-22. In the worst cases of harassment culture, victims and researchers both agree that fish rots at the head. Management sets the tone and is either actively participating in harassment, or turning a blind eye to it.
The CEOs of Riot, Ubisoft, you name it, will never read the EEOC report: they are a part of the problem. So why are we sending them our suggestions? The only recommendations they care about are how to avoid liability, and the highly profitable harassment training industry has them covered there.
“What if We Tried More Training?”
Bizarrely, while the report demonstrates that anti-harassment training isn’t provably effective, their proposed solution is more training. Specifically bystander intervention training — often implemented in communities and schools — which teaches witnesses to intervene in case of harassment.
Bystander intervention strategies include distracting the assailant, directly confronting them, checking in with the potential victim, or calling for help. But of course this counts on there even being a bystander, whereas harassment can occur with just two people present.
Even more limiting, bystander intervention training tends to assume equal power relationships between all present, usually as strangers. Classic scenarios include watching a fellow bus passenger or a drunk student at a party demonstrating sexually aggressive behavior. The goal is to help participants overcome their disinclination to interfere in what they see as “someone else’s business.”
But in the context of a workplace, all interactions are colored by power dynamics. What if the harasser is a supervisor, a star employee, or a friend of management? While bystander intervention training might help employees speak up, your coworkers and bosses are not strangers on a bus.
Retaliation is a common response to resistance or rejection of harassment. This is illegal, but it’s easy for employers to find another excuse to not promote or rehire, citing reasons like “not a culture fit” or “uncooperative,” and this can drive people out of entire industries. A veteran HR rep told Vox in 2019:
“I’ve spent 20 years working in human resources, and in that time I’ve learned that we’re paid to preserve the status quo. At the end of the year, nobody asks the local HR team for a report on how many employees were protected from predatory sexual behavior or how many bullies were fired. If anything, we’re compensated and bonused on arbitrary data, such as retention and turnover. If companies wanted us to get rid of troublemakers, they’d pay us to do so.”
A discrimination lawyer told the New York Times in 2017, “H.R.’s client is the company, which means that H.R. is supposed to protect the company’s interests.”
Even anonymous workplace hotlines can be used as a weapon of retaliation. The EEOC report cites the story of Jacquelyn Hines, a single mother working at a supply chain warehouse. She and other female coworkers were being verbally and physically harassed by a supervisor.
“When these women asked him to ‘stop talking dirty to me’ or ‘leave me alone,’ his response was that he ‘wasn’t going to get into trouble, he ran the place,’ and if anyone complained to HR, they would be fired.”
One of Jacquelyn’s female coworkers was fired after using the company’s supposedly anonymous hotline. Jacquelyn tried to stand up for her co-worker, but soon after she did:
“Her hours were cut, she lost pay, and within a week she was fired. The male coworker who had stood up to the supervisor on behalf of his colleagues, and told him to stop making comments because the women didn’t like it? He was fired, too.”
“Some time later, Jacquelyn applied for and was hired at a different branch of the company, in Mississippi. She worked there for a few weeks and the job was going well, until one day she was abruptly escorted off the premises. The HR manager would later explain that she had recognized Jacquelyn’s name from the Memphis plant and had her fired from her job in Mississippi.”
Are there people who work in HR who have the best of intentions? Sure. Do those intentions matter if the only real power they can wield is on behalf of the owners of the company, and not the workers in actual need of help? No.
Power-Based Problems, Power-Based Solutions
While the report centers worker safety as the reason to combat harassment, it also highlights the financial incentive. Lawsuits and EEOC settlements can cost a company millions, and bad press can drive profits down.
And there are hidden expenses. Hostile working environments lower worker productivity — even for workers who are not directly abused — and drive talent out of the industry. This happens regardless of if anyone sues, and most people don’t.
So, the logic of the report goes: even if you’re a cold-hearted bastard who only cares about the bottom line, stopping harassment makes good business sense.
This was when I had to stop reading, because the report’s logic was sound. Many discuss the modern workplace (some in praise, some pejoratively) as a cutthroat world where all that matters is the bottom line. The image of the stone-faced businessman laying workers off just before Christmas Eve has been with us since the industrial revolution. And there’s obviously some truth to this narrative of profit before all — but I think it’s only some.
Yes, it makes good business sense to prevent harassment. If all you care about is increasing the total profits of a company, that is objectively and measurably true. But you know what else makes good business? Not contributing to climate change. Ecological disasters such as wildfires cause billions in economic losses, and yet oil and coal barons lobby against regulation and push climate denial propaganda. The sociopolitical degradation that has long been predicted (and currently happening) is bad for business. Workers being pushed to exhaustion, burnt out, and forced out of industries is bad for business.
It’s hard to believe that executives from McDonald’s to Ubisoft somehow don’t know this. And yet, here we are having the same discussion about harassment in the games industry again, and again, and again.
The best way to improve working conditions — and thus productivity — is to give workers agency over the systems that affect them. So this may sound strange, but I think there is something that bosses care more about than the bottom line: power. Profits are nice, but the thrill of having total control over every company decision is priceless to the executive class.
When a worker is harassed, they have to endure a process that they had no say in designing. After filing an HR report they’ll wait patiently for weeks or months, all the while the abuse continues unabated and unpunished, only to see a useless ruling. Nobody ever gets to vote on how the system for handling abuse should work — so no wonder it doesn’t serve us!
When sexual harassment was deemed legal a issue, the only thing that changed was companies treating it as a legal liability. So let’s stop waiting for researchers and the courts to solve this problem for us. Let’s ask ourselves, “is HR structured in a way that helps people? Or could we build something different and better?”
To actually prevent harassment requires transforming the shape of power in the workplace. It means building unions. It means building a workplace where we are unafraid to speak our minds, and have the agency to make improvements ourselves.
And if workers can do this for themselves, then what’s the point of management?
