Complacency: The Breeding Ground for Risk

The blatant cases of harassment and discrimination are gone, people keep telling us. Those outrageous behaviors and over-the-top scenarios are a thing of the past. Perhaps partly because of my background as an employment attorney, human resource and other organizational executives often seem eager to make this point to me. Again and again, I hear the same refrain: “Those things don’t happen around here any more. People know better now. Our struggles are with the subtler conduct – the behaviors that don’t clearly cross the line.”

I don’t doubt that organizations are indeed struggling with subtler, not necessarily illegal workplace conduct – bullying, humiliation, exclusion, and similar issues. In fact, it’s a topic I’ve been writing and speaking about for the past several years, because I believe it’s a growing problem that requires more attention than it’s received thus far. The damage these “gray area” behaviors can cause to the business can be just as devastating as a high-profile lawsuit, and without the hammer of the law, they can be even more challenging to prevent and address. But what concerns me is this assumption that we’ve addressed the blatantly illegal behaviors, and nothing more needs to be done. It was a task that we’ve conquered, it’s behind us, and now we can move on to the next one.

Certainly, since the launching of the modern civil rights movement, much progress has been made. And yet, we continue to learn of stories that remind us we can’t drop our guard. Some of the most outrageous symbols of hatred and prejudice, including nooses, swastikas, and Klan regalia, have surfaced in workplaces of all types in recent years – from institutions of higher learning to telecommunications companies to local government offices – showing that longstanding prejudices remain, even if they lurk deep below our collective consciousness.

Just in the past year, an African-American professor at Columbia University found a noose outside her office. One would think the halls of academia (Ivy League academia, at that) would be the last place such a symbol of racial oppression would appear. Similar incidents have occurred recently in other areas of the United States, and unfortunately, the behavior continues. If you perform a Google news search any day of the week, you’ll likely find another headline announcing another seemingly unbelievable act. After a recent incident involving the display of a noose and other racially based behavior at an Oklahoma plastics factory, the employee’s mother was quoted, remarking in amazement, “…it’s still happening. It’s 2008 and we really haven’t progressed that much.”

The Columbia University incident and other similar episodes in New York recently prompted the passage of state legislation that makes it a felony punishable by four years in prison to use the noose as a symbol for racial intimidation and harassment. Some say New York’s law will be challenged on constitutional grounds, and there is much debate about it online in blogs, among legal experts, and among civil rights advocates. But is the constitutionality of the law really the most compelling question to come out of these cases? I don’t think so. Whether or not the law is challenged, the more disconcerting and pointed question is why these symbols have arisen now. Why, in this environment where we hear that “we’re past this,” is this happening to such an extent that there is a need for a specific law to prohibit such noxious practices?

I think one of the primary culprits is complacency. We need to realize that longstanding prejudices and the symbols used to express them don’t vanish quickly. They arose over time, hundreds of years in some instances, and became cultural icons. As such, they should be seen as latent viruses silently incubating, waiting for the right conditions to rapidly spread. And complacency is one of the key conditions that will allow the behaviors to spread. The organization notes that it hasn’t had any issues for a while, so leaders assume the job is done. It goes into an almost auto-pilot-like state. An extension of that complacency is seen in the misguided notion that these issues can be prevented by having employees read and sign a policy and go through a training course, and that any incidents that do occur afterwards are simply the isolated acts of individual “bad apples.”

The facts of many recent cases reflecting a variety of illegal workplace behaviors show otherwise. Oftentimes, the conduct occurred and then thrived because system-wide conditions allowed for it: managers didn’t know how to respond appropriately to complaints, or worse, actively stifled them; individuals were not being held consistently accountable to standards touted by the organization, its leadership, its values, and its policies; and the organization sent an unspoken message about priorities by relegating communications and training about these topics to the back burner. Downplaying the seriousness of inappropriate behavior by attributing it to a “bad apple” is dangerous on several levels, not the least of which is that it can create a breeding ground for more, and potentially worse, behavior. Individual bad acts can occur in any organization; the environment, culture, and response to the behavior are what make the difference between a truly isolated but effectively handled issue and a scandalous headline.

Secondly, organizations often get caught in a trap of viewing workplace initiatives from a “flavor-of-the-month” perspective. After several landmark Supreme Court cases were decided in the late 1990s ( Faragher, Ellerth, and Kolstad), organizations were quick to implement policies, procedures, and training to minimize risk and exposure on harassment claims and supervisory misconduct. When Sarbanes-Oxley and new federal sentencing guidelines arose out of the fallout from Enron, WorldCom, and other high-profile ethics disasters, companies began focusing on developing and disseminating carefully crafted Codes of Conduct and loading massive online compliance libraries covering hundreds of topics – many not even necessarily relevant to their business or all of their employees – onto their learning management systems. Most recently, California passed legislation mandating training for supervisors every other year on sexual harassment prevention. Software vendors have literally built entire businesses on providing compliance programs for organizations scrambling to comply with this law. Whether or not the training is effective or integrates with any other initiatives an organization might be implementing is irrelevant. The emphasis is on getting it done.

The cycles continue, and each new law or scandal brings a distraction of focus from any type of overarching strategic plan and goal. With varying disciplines in the organization – HR, legal, diversity, compliance – concentrating their resources and attention on different issues, the direction becomes even more fragmented. Rather than seeing the interplay of each of these issues and disciplines at an organizational level, as well as the common skills and behaviors they all draw upon, it becomes a competition – and that’s assuming, of course, that these separate entities are even aware of what the other departments are doing. At the same time, the assumption that issues such as the overt racial, sexual, or other forms of harassment that received so much attention 20 or even 10 years ago are gone – no longer happening in our workplaces – further diminishes the intensity organizations place on these issues, even within HR, Diversity, and other departments where these topics traditionally fall. The result: the behaviors are allowed to creep back in.

As I’ve written about before, these are interconnected initiatives and ongoing processes that are all vital to the health of the business and the culture. Emphasizing one at the expense of others is an ineffective, inefficient, and ultimately, risky approach. To combat complacency and the disjointed focus of resources and attention, organizations need to consider the following:

• When it comes to our workplace culture, what is the strategic direction and goal? In other words, what cultural and environmental attributes are necessary to support our business mission? When viewed from this perspective, it becomes clear where and how the HR, legal, compliance, diversity, and other disciplines intersect, and the objectives and priorities should be set from there. It also becomes a part of the ongoing strategic direction of the organization and the business, no less important than sales, safety, quality, and other vital statistics. Making this clear link to the business mission helps keep complacency at bay. Just as a manufacturing facility can’t become lax on safety goals after maintaining an accident-free workplace for a specified period of time, it can’t forget about its workplace cultural goals either, no matter how much time has passed since the last incident.
• What are the skills and behaviors our managers and employees must demonstrate to support our desired workplace culture? Beyond raising awareness and imparting knowledge about particular issues, communication and training must focus on specific, practical, and applicable skills that people can and must develop. Many of the competences are common to all of the issues these different organizational entities are working to address. For example, whether you’re talking about preventing outrageous forms of racial harassment, ethics violations, or “legal” problematic behaviors like bullying, managers must know how to effectively and persuasively communicate the organization’s standards, hold people accountable to them, and create an environment where employees are comfortable raising concerns to them. Employees, in turn, must know when and how to communicate concerns about inappropriate conduct. These common – though not always commonplace – skills are at the heart of all of the issues.
• Are we reinforcing what we’ve communicated to ensure these messages and concepts remain top of mind? It’s too soon in our cultural history to assume the resentments that gave rise to the symbols of hatred described in the cases above have been purged and all of us are cured. We need to remind people regularly what constitutes appropriate behavior, providing clear standards and examples of not only what is acceptable but what is not acceptable. It’s when we fail to do so that episodes arise and the need for legislation is triggered. This is an ongoing responsibility for employers and a civic responsibility as well. We have to keep talking about the origins of these symbols of hatred and why we have laws. We’ve made progress. We’re not past it.

Several years ago, I was talking to a client’s VP of Human Resources about his concerns over the bullying behavior exhibited by a group of “hot shots” in the organization. Though high revenue producers, they consistently yelled at, humiliated, and demeaned other employees. As we discussed the behaviors and the toxic effect they were having on the organization, its ability to attract new employees, and the productivity and morale of team members, I was struck by the one question that was his primary concern: “The behavior’s not illegal, though, right?”

Organizations, and particularly leaders, are gradually beginning to understand the true costs of these kinds of “non-illegal” but damaging behaviors that violate organizational values, and that is a tremendous step in moving the workplace culture forward. But at the same time, that doesn’t mean they can become less vigilant about the blatantly illegal behaviors they’ve worked so hard to prevent and address thus far. Organizations need to embrace a broad strategy that encompasses both the “law” issues and the “values” issues. We’ve made great progress in our workplaces, but if we put either of these on the back burner, we’ll only go backwards. Becoming complacent, diminishing the intensity of focus on any of these issues, or doing just the minimum to get by is, quite frankly, a serious business mistake that will open the door to myriad risks and an erosion of the workplace culture.

Stephen M. Paskoff, Esq.
Stephen M. Paskoff, Esq., is President of ELI ®, a training firm that helps clients translate values into behaviors, increase employee contribution, build respectful and inclusive cultures, and reduce risk. Prior to establishing ELI in 1986, he was a trial attorney for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and partner in a management law firm.