Befriending an HR Dragon… What if HR was on my side?
Written by HRuprise coach, Cindy Gross.
Content Warning: Sexual Harassment
One night back in 2015, I went out to dinner with a group of male coworkers. We had a good dinner and even better conversations. As we left for the evening, two of us split off from the group and headed for our cars on one end of the parking lot while everyone else went the other way.
And that is when someone stole our joy. A man leaving a nearby restaurant with two male managers turned around to talk to us. He was on my team but worked on a different technology, so we rarely interacted. Out of nowhere, he verbally harassed me and my coworker with sexually explicit commentary. We worked to defuse the situation and eventually he and the two managers left.
My coworker and I decided to go back to the restaurant to have a drink. We nursed our drinks for a long time and talked about past times when someone harassed us, our jobs, why we both came back to Microsoft. But we did not talk about what had just happened. Then we left. I went back to my apartment and tried to sleep. Tried, and mostly failed. I had some nightmares and spent the rest of the night laying awake, processing a ton of intrusive thoughts. Over and over I replayed what had happened, what I wished I had said, what I could have done to avoid the situation or get out of it sooner. I wondered if the bully’s actions that night counted as harassment, but it wasn’t anything like what they covered in our yearly mandatory harassment training, so I figured it didn’t “count.”
Here’s where HR should have come in. The next morning, I saw one of the managers who witnessed the harassment and asked why he hadn’t intervened. He claimed he did not know what I was talking about. That brought me to tears – first the harassment and now the gaslighting.
As I walked by my own manager’s office, he noticed I was crying and invited me in. I tearfully told the whole story and he went to “investigate.” At the end of the day, my manager called me back in. He had a list of excuses for why I was better off not going to HR, including what I now know to be misinformation about Microsoft’s harassment policy. He told me the manager I had confronted that morning would go to HR about me and accuse me of harassment for asking him those questions. So I shut up, sucked it up, and watched my work relationships deteriorate.
A few months later I moved to another team, and eventually befriended enough internal dragons to report my experience to HR. They found the bully had violated Microsoft’s anti-harassment policy, but as far as I can tell the only real consequence was he wasn’t put forward for a possible promotion that year. They didn’t offer me anything beyond surface-level sympathy. Last I checked, the bully was still there.
I left. I quit Microsoft. I quit tech. Tech lost me and my 25 years of experience, skills, wisdom, and value.
If I could have designed my dream HR team for that moment, what would it look like? What would have helped me most, and what do I wish to be available to anyone who is bullied or harassed at work?
I want HR to be there for me as an employee, putting my needs above the needs of management and the advice of the company’s lawyers. That means their Prime Directive would be to promote “thrival” (as opposed to mere survival) for employees. This includes recognition that protecting and retaining a more diverse group of employees is proactive risk management for the company.
I want HR folks who understand systems-thinking, and in particular how systems of oppression work. I want them to SEE the racialized and gendered standards of success that exist all around. I want them to be invested in reshaping those success bars for a more equitable, just, anti-bullying workplace.
I want Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) to replace Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (D&I or DEI). That means pushing past the standard once-a-year diversity training towards a true, 24/7 culture shift. It means going beyond mentoring women and people of color to adapt, dilute and censor themselves in order to fit into existing white male power structures, and instead making it safe for them to truly belong, and speak out, as their authentic selves at work. It requires nothing less than embedding JEDI into every aspect of every team’s strategic planning and execution.
I want HR to prioritize retaining the employee who faced the bully over the jerk who did the bullying, regardless of the “brilliance” of the latter.
I want companies to pay for trauma-informed career coaching and to cover the copays and deductibles for as much therapy as is needed to process the trauma of experiencing and reporting harassment.
Here are some specific steps HR can take now towards becoming the dream team we all deserve at work:
Provide a secure method for employees to report problems anonymously.
Provide anti-harassment training that specifically addresses racial and sexual harassment, harassment as a type of bullying, and a clear line against even “small” types of bullying.
Enforce proportionate accountability for the bully, and those who enabled the bully.
If someone changes teams as part of the investigation, it should be the bully, not the target of the bullying.
Encourage highly functional unions. Unions are there for folks who have been bullied or harassed at work, and help balance the power dynamics between employees, management, and stockholders.
Support the Dignity at Work Act (DAWA) in every state.
Stop requiring non-disclosure, non-disparagement, and no-rehire clauses when compensating employees for a workplace bully. These legal tools limit employees’ ability to create change for themselves, their workplaces, and society. Worse, they function as silencers, which can compound the trauma of the original abuse and balloon the costs, both financial and emotional, of working through it.
We can’t fix all these problems overnight, but we can all contribute. If you’re an employee who was bullied or harassed, or you wonder if you were bullied or harassed, HRuprise has coaches who can help you understand what is happening and what your options are. These are folks who understand HR and/or have lived experiences with bullies and are here to help you through your own situation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: CINDY GROSS
Cindy Gross is a generative coach, an adaptive community leader, an anti-racism leader, an ex-techie, and the founder of Befriending Dragons. She nurtures equitable anti-bullying, anti-racist cultures via coaching partnerships with folks on their own personal culture change journeys. LEARN MORE
