Unreasonable steps

It turns out when you speak quickly with an Irish accent in London, people don’t quite get what you said. This let to a funny interaction with a client this week. We were talking about the Employment Rights Act and the “all reasonable steps” requirement that is coming into force this year.

My client thought I was being snarky and saying “unreasonable” instead of “all reasonable”. Fair. He’s known me for a few years now – it’s perfectly plausible.

You however, probably don’t know me. To save on tedious introductions why don’t you check out that part of my website and here I’ll let you know my aims for this blog.

Harassment Prevention

Harm is happening in every workplace in every country in every industry. Senior leaders are scrambling every day to manage this harm – to protect people from further harm, to stop the financial flood associated with tribunals and to stop the press from getting a whiff.

The law in the UK has been rapidly changing with regards to employment rights in the 21st century. Whilst usually necessary and completely overdue – especially in the wake of increasing online harms – one thing is true: the administrative burden on HR teams is HUGE.

And now the employment rights bill is suggesting that your company needs to take all reasonable steps to prevent harm. All. Of. Them.

Aims of this blog

I’m not going to overpromise here. So approximately fortnightly, I’m going to take a small number of press items from the fortnight just gone and tell you what reasonable steps they could (should) have taken to avoid that harm from being caused. I’ll also occasionally share other thoughts based on interactions with clients.

A teaser

Some things I might have said to Channel 4’s CEO following the recent press about Married at First Sight if they’d called:

Re: public statements

– You never want to be hounded for an apology where vulnerable people are involved so let’s decide whether there are any apologies you’re able to make before a review has taken place
– We’ve got to consider the optics of your own gender/sex in this context – not hide from it or pretend that you’ll receive the same criticisms as a male CEO
– Reiterating the systems and people that you did have in place to mitigate is not a good idea – these people are telling you, and now the broader public, that those safety nets didn’t work in their case, and so it looks like you’re calling them liars (even if you’re not)…

Re: the actual reports

– This is not your first rodeo, this is not even reality tv’s first rodeo so why wasn’t this scenario planned for *well* and mitigated for seasons ago?
– Any good advisor would have (may well have!) pointed the high likelihood of people experiencing this harm from way before season 1 was aired and if they didn’t then let’s be real that accountability should be taken for not getting the right advisors around the team (and no, that’s not an invitation to sue your advisors)
– On that note, this feels like a legal thing, and it is – it’s also a PR thing but first and foremost this is a *people thing* – people are saying that they have been hurt and that your institutional response has not alleviated that hurt, let’s use that as our anchor, let’s never lose sight of that.

P.S. in case you didn’t know, at least three former cast members of the dating show married at first sight have reported that they experienced sexual violence on the show. Channel 4’s public response so far has been lukewarm at best and there have been multiple exasperated calls from experts and people in power.

Come back

So set your clocks for Tuesday mornings. Grab yourself a cuppa and hope that I’m not writing about your company.
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If we’ve not met, I’m Dr Enya Doyle – The Harassment Doctor – I’ve spent years researching institutional harm so you don’t have to. I advise brands all over the globe to prevent harm.