Harassment Solutions Inc.

Last week’s decision to suspend Hamilton judge Bernd Zabel, made me think that things are changing…a bit. This decision to suspend judge Zabel for one month without pay for wearing his Donald Trump hat into court the day after Trump won the U.S. election, was rather surprising. A Canadian judge has to do something really bad or stupid for the rather small-c conservative group of judges who make up Canada’s Judicial Council to take strong action.

However, this suspension comes just a few months after federal court judge Robin Camp resigned for his inappropriate questions and comments made during a sexual assault trial in Alberta in 2015. Camp resigned before he was about to be thrown off the bench. If memory serves me right, Camp is only the third Canadian judge to resign before he would have been thrown off the bench…and that’s since 1971 when the Judicial Council was created.

So yes, things may be changing…but I find they are only changing a tiny bit, when it comes to inappropriate behaviours in the workplace. Most people aren’t judges, but these two examples are a sign that at the very top, where there is a lot of scrutiny, there seems to be much quicker responses to bad behaviour than in the past. CEOs such as Uber’s co-founder Travis Kalanick who resigned less than 3 months ago, started with postings of sexism and sexual harassment within their ranks. Another example involving a CEO comes from Google. No, their CEO Sundar Pachai didn’t do anything wrong, but he came home from a family summer vacation last month to deal with the firing of a software engineer who sent out a widely-circulated memo basically saying women aren’t fit for the stressful world of high-tech.

I could go on with lots of high-profile firings or damage control due to inappropriate comments and actions in the workplace, but I think you get the idea. What I’m finding is that now that our world is all about “brand,” whether you like it or not, action will be taken if the brand will be harmed. So at the top, whether a CEO, a judge or someone lower down but getting high-profile attention, there’s a better chance action will be taken to save the “brand.” In the case of judges, the judicial system can no longer be seen as being out of touch with reality or Canadians may disregard the decisions of the courts. For the non-court world, everyone else is afraid a bad post or tweet will lose sales or customers.

I think there’s still enormous progress needed to be made in the everyday parts of the job…with people who aren’t CEOs or similar. Too often I’m still called on to help managers deal with inappropriate behaviour they don’t know how to address, or are surprised bad behaviours are still the “norm.” I’ve been in this business for 25 years now and I truly expected there would be a lot less bad stuff going on at work. Considering we have so much legislation, so many workplace policies and so much education about what’s good and what’s bad, I thought we’d have been much further along. Good job security for me, but not so good for those who have to endure bad behaviour or just idiots.

When a workplace discourages bad behaviour and responds quickly to bad behaviour from the bottom to the top, then no one has to worry about harming your brand. In fact it enhances your brand and as corny as it sounds, people will want to work there and stay there. It just takes a little work.

Every May Day (May 1st) I get caught off guard. This morning, thanks to a couple article in the paper, I had to think, “Right, it was 34 years ago today that I was arrested in communist Poland, interrogated for 5 hours, then two days later thrown out of the country for being a spy. Funny how it eludes me each year, but it does.

We can say those were different times, but just try having any dissent in Turkey, or Russia. Or how dare you be gay in the likes of Chechnya, let alone most of the Arab countries. As for women…well, let’s just say horrors are still done in the name of religion, culture or tradition, the likes of which send shock waves through our bodies.

So in Canada, after decades of fights, protests, legal challenges and reluctantly-passed laws, people still feel uncomfortable to assert the basic rights we have available to us. It’s a concern…to say the least. So on May Day, I encourage people at work to take a look at your policies and practises, and if something is lacking or glaringly wrong, then say something.

After all, we now live in a world where “brand” is everything (just ask United Airlines about that!). So even if your employer doesn’t want to do the right thing, protecting employees from harassment, bullying and discrimination, for the right reasons, perhaps you can get your employer to do the right thing by avoiding instantaneous harm to its brand. But I want to be fair. Most employers truly want to do the right thing. Very few are willing to be known to have a toxic workplace.

If you have a workplace where your policies will win a Pulitzer Prize for being so great, but people are afraid to use them, then you’ve got work to do. Managers should ask honest questions of employees about their willingness to speak up, and employees must be honest with their answers.

Go ahead, on May Day, this International Workers’ Day, get together and ask one another, what’s working, what’s not, and what do we need to do to improve our workplace.