Bystander Intervention: a promising new trend in addressing workplace harassment

In the post-#MeToo era, corporations are being held to a higher standard — but sexual harassment training — the leading vehicle that employers use to prevent harassment — are woefully outdated.

In the 1980s when sexual harassment trainings were implemented nationwide, they tended to be designed by lawyers. The focus was on legal definitions and reporting resources, with the goal of reducing employer liability when sexual harassment occurred (i.e. “See! We told them not to do that.”) But this approach failed to address the complex realities of power, identity, and relationships that are at the core of sexual harassment. The failure of this training approach has been proven over time: in 1980, the government surveyed its own workers and found that 42% of women and 15% of men experienced sexual harassment in the workplace. In 2018, 38 years later, an MSN poll showed a slight increase in sexual harassment for women and consistent data for men — 45% of women said they were sexually harassed and 15% percent of men said they were. experiencing sexual harassment in the workplace.

As a leader in the field of sexual harassment for the past 15 years and the co-founder and executive director of the anti-harassment nonprofit Hollaback!, I know we can do better.

To meaningfully make a dent in this issue, we need to move upstream and start to intervene in moments of disrespect well before they become harassment. Things like eye-rolling, taking credit for other people’s work, or failing to support a co-worker — are all examples of behaviors on what we call “the spectrum of disrespect.”

The idea behind the spectrum of disrespect is that when you have a workplace culture where speaking over people is acceptable, it creates a workplace culture where shaming/humiliation, often in the form of jokes becomes a little more acceptable. And when you have a workplace culture where shaming/humiliation, often in the form of jokes is acceptable, it creates a workplace culture where instances that we traditionally refer to as harassment — such as inappropriate comments or sexual innuendos — become acceptable. The idea here is to move upstream and prevent harassment by addressing disrespect at its root.

A New Training Approach

Noting this failure of public policy to reduce sexual harassment, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has taken note and recommended “bystander intervention” and “workplace civility” trainings in lieu of traditional sexual harassment training.

While traditional sexual harassment trainings tell you what to do and what not to do, and where to report harassment once it’s happened, bystander intervention and workplace civility trainings diagnose the problem differently. They see sexual harassment as part of a broader workplace culture — one where putting others down, speaking over people, and making racist or sexist comments in the form of “jokes,” is accepted, and at times, rewarded. Bystander intervention has been widely used as a strategy to address sexual assault on college campuses but is a newer trend in workplaces pioneering by organizations like Vox Media, Bandcamp, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.

Beyond Top-Down

While workplace culture starts at the top it can become viral, perpetuated, and reinforced by employees in thousands of different ways on a daily basis. You don’t fix a toxic workplace culture by just being really respectful of your employees (although it is a start), you fix it by teaching them to be respectful to each other.

To be clear, not all forms of disrespect are based on bias. Things like stress, communication style, and competition can all create disrespectful workplace dynamics as well. But bias can be one of many drivers of disrespect, and even more tricky, it can be a driver of disrespect in ways that we may not be able to see.

We often think of harassment as a result of explicit bias, i.e. “women aren’t as smart as men.” But it’s rarely this clear cut. Implicit bias shows up as unconscious, making it tricky to diagnose and even trickier to uproot inside of workplaces. Things like — a white person at a conference lunch being more likely to sit at a table of white people rather than people of color, or a man being more likely to interrupt his female co-workers than his male co-workers — are all examples of implicit bias. It’s something that almost all of us have an exhibit to some degree; not because we are bad people, but because we are part of a culture that despite great advancement is still racist, sexist, homophobic, and the list goes on.

The role of implicit bias means that while everyone can (and likely has) experienced disrespect in the workplace at some time or another — women, people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, and other marginalized groups tend to experience it more. As a result, the impacts are often more severe and can include things like anxiety, inability to focus, absenteeism, drop in productivity and creativity — and of course, retention.

Five Bystander Intervention Tactics

Bystander intervention gives employers and employers more options. It goes beyond recommending that employees just “report harassment” and offers solutions for a gentle, safe way to correct disrespectful behavior before it happens. The nonprofit organization Hollaback! drilled this into a methodology called “the 5D’s.” Initial results are promising; 98% of people leave this training saying that they will intervene the next time they see disrespect in their workplace.

Here are the five strategies:

1. Distract. Create some sort of distraction to de-escalate the situation. This could look like changing the subject, dropping a cup full of pens on the floor, or spilling your water. It could also mean starting a conversation with the person who is being disrespected or calling them over to your desk to help you out with an imaginary problem. This one is best used when the situation is ongoing and you’re looking for a way to disrupt it and make it stop.
2. Delegate. Here we often think about reporting to HR departments and managers. While those are viable options, you should also think about your co-worker sitting next to you who may be better positioned to intervene. Maybe they are friends with the person being disrespectful, maybe they are in a position of greater authority, or maybe you suspect they will have less risk of retaliation. Whatever it is, most people want to help; they just don’t know how.
3. Document. Our brains like to do us a favor and forget key details about traumatic events. Think about Christine Blasey Ford: she remembered the boys laughing in technicolor, but she didn’t remember the exact time or location of her assault. Taking notes of these kinds of details: what was said, who was there, where was it, what time was it, etc, and then giving to the person who was disrespected so they can decide what to do next can be very empowering, and useful, if it escalates into an investigation.
4. Delay. If you freeze up and don’t do anything — don’t worry — there’s still something important you can do afterwards: check in on the person. Too often we see that the trauma of “everyone saw it and no one did anything” is even worse than the initial incident. Go to the person who experienced the harassment and disrespect, tell them you saw what happened, and ask if they are OK. Maybe they want to take a walk with you, maybe they’d love a coffee, or maybe they just want to be left alone. Either way, they are likely to be grateful that you checked in on them.
5. Direct. This one is often mistaken as being inherently confrontational, but you don’t need to be confrontational to be direct. In fact, confrontation can lead to escalation, which is the exact opposite of what you’re trying to do here. Instead, try gently suggesting the behavior you want to see changed, i.e. “hey, let’s give her a chance to speak.”. Another option is to frame your feedback as a question, i.e. “why was her race relevant to that story?” This can give the person a chance to clarify what they meant, or to catch themselves in how their words may not have lined up to their values.

To be sure, there are so many great reasons why bystander intervention in the workplace is tricky. There are power dynamics and relationships to navigate. There is the fear of retaliation. There’s also a fear of not having enough context that is very, very real.

The idea here isn’t just to “get over” these concerns. It’s to say, “OK, here’s what I’m worried about, so what else can I try?”

New York City is the first place in the country to mandate that bystander intervention training be a component of all mandated sexual harassment training, and more cities and states are sure to follow suit.

Bystander intervention training gives us the opportunity to move beyond old frameworks of “the people who harass” and the “the people who experience harassment” and towards an understanding that all of us have been disrespected and have been disrespectful in the workplace at some point (although some more than others).

But it also allows us to see that just “not harassing people isn’t enough.” If we really want to meaningfully address harassment in the workplace, we need to see how each of us can contribute to stopping toxic workplace culture. That starts with making the training companies are already offering work to not just decrease employer liability, but to equip employees with the tools to disrupt disrespect before it ever turns into harassment.

Emily May is the co-founder and executive director of Hollaback!, an organization working to end harassment in all its forms. She is also an Ashoka Fellow, a Prime Movers Fellow, a graduate of the London School of Economics, and her organization has trained more than 200,000 people in bystander intervention tactics.