The quandary of whether to report incidents of workplace harassment is often a challenging one for victimized employees, who may be apprehensive about potential reprisals or harm to their reputation.
However, a recent study from Columbia Business School reveals that the implementation of a more secure reporting protocol can bolster the willingness of harassed employees to step forward. By utilizing a technique known as “hard garbling,” surveyors recorded a notable upsurge in reporting of physical harassment by 288%, sexual harassment by 269%, and threatening behavior by 46%.
“Under the status quo, victims stay silent, or they may have to take their complaint public and face retaliation from a colleague or supervisor,” the researchers explain. “This research shows that when companies adjust reporting to use hard-garbling, employees recognize that they have an added layer of protection in disclosure – ensuring companies get a more accurate picture of harassment and can take action more quickly. We hope our work encourages companies to improve their harassment reporting and take a proactive role.”
Encouraging speaking up
In collaboration with an undisclosed large-scale garment manufacturer in Bangladesh, the team employed a phone-based survey approach, accumulating a total of 2,141 responses. The study was the first to apply the hard-garbling method—a technique of automatically garbling survey responses—in a real-world context, as opposed to controlled behavioral laboratories.
By incorporating hard-garbling, respondents were granted plausible deniability when reporting incidents of harassment, thereby fostering a greater sense of honesty. Notably, the researchers ensured that 2 out of every 10 consecutive reports were flagged as harassment cases, preventing isolated reports and encouraging more candid survey responses. Through the analysis of garbled reports, surveyors were able to ascertain policy-relevant harassment statistics.
Within the survey, the research team assessed three distinct approaches, employing randomized variations among participants. Among these methods, hard-garbling emerged as the most effective in unearthing the true extent of harassment within the company.
Limited intervention
However, it bore the limitation of reducing the severity of the company’s interventions following harassment reports, as innocent individuals were automatically implicated in the system. The second method, known as rapport building, involved surveyors engaging respondents in guided casual conversations, aiming to foster trust and rapport.
While this approach marginally increased reporting, it extended the survey duration. The final method sought to alleviate respondents’ fears of traceable responses by collecting minimal personally identifying information. Regrettably, this method failed to boost reporting and provided decision-makers with less comprehensive information on harassment reports, impeding a thorough understanding of the company’s harassment landscape.
Uncovering the problem
Utilizing the hard-garbling method, the survey findings reveal that within the workplace, 7.7% of employees encountered sexual harassment, 13.6% experienced threatening behavior, and 5.7% were subjected to physical harassment. By contrast, when respondents were surveyed without employing hard-garbling, only 1.78% reported incidents of sexual harassment, 9.9% reported threatening behavior, and 1.52% reported instances of physical harassment.
Furthermore, the study sheds light on the distribution of responsibility for harassment within the organizational hierarchy. It unveils that 36% of supervisors bear responsibility for 56% of harassment cases. In the context of physical harassment, 27.5% of supervisors are accountable for 65% of such incidents, while in cases of sexual harassment, 31% of supervisors are responsible for 57.5% of occurrences. These statistics underscore the pervasive nature of harassment within the company, rendering a blanket policy of terminating all misbehaving supervisors an unlikely feasible solution.
The research underscores the prevalent reluctance among victims to come forward, owing to the potential risks of retaliation. By detecting early indicators of harassment issues, this study endeavors to mitigate the escalation of the problem, preventing its transformation into a more significant and entrenched challenge.
“Our partner company is exceptional in the way it sought to understand their issues with harassment. Most establishments prefer to avoid knowing. In a way, this is perhaps the paradigm shift we want to achieve,” the researchers conclude.
