Whether its social media spats or arguments at a work drinks event, it’s increasingly common to see investigations into disagreements that turned sour. How can we foster more harmonious workplaces, asks Matt Dean?
Work behaviour and, particularly, investigations into work behaviour, have dominated the news cycle in 2023. Almost every week it feels like we’re waiting for another investigation to reveal misconduct; to hear whether someone senior has been judged to have overstepped the mark at work.
Within the space of a month or so we’ve had the then Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab investigated (in two separate ministries of state), the head of the CBI and then Tesco. Then came ITV and Philip Schofield: who knew what, when?
These are employers at the centre of what might still be called the establishment, all holding their most senior leaders to account for how they’ve treated others at work.
Transgressions of a sexual nature tend to attract the most airtime. What finally did for the Johnson premiership was his failure to take a complaint about Conservative MP Chris Pincher’s transgressions at a work event seriously. But plain vanilla abrasiveness or abusiveness can also dominate the headlines, as Raab found.
High emotions
Work behaviour, and how we make decisions about it, matters. A friend recently joked with me that work culture was a good business to be in, admitting that they hadn’t really understood what Byrne Dean did when I first explained it to them some years ago.
Polarisation and culture
Culture change: Three focus areas for the CBI’s chief people officer
Things have changed. Now everyone understands what we do and the need for us: to work with employers on their people issues, their culture – normally because they want to improve things, sometimes because they’ve had a serious incident.
However, investigating work behaviour is a tough job. It’s never binary; emotions run high and often overflow. Context is key and there’s seldom, if ever, clear evidence of wrongdoing. Definitions of wrongdoing – particularly the ones in the employers’ policies – can be really subjective. It’s about finely balanced judgement calls.
Culture war
As an aside, this subjectivity has been hijacked by one side in the developing culture war being fought around work behaviour. It’s this culture war, and the impact that increasing polarisation of workplaces is having, that I want to focus on.
Dominic Raab left his ministerial position (and it seems public life) with a very clear statement that the bar for what can amount to bullying has been set far too low.
Many in his echo chamber vehemently agreed: for them a driven, demanding and possibly abrasive Minister of State should not be prevented from effectively governing by “snowflake” civil servants. Meanwhile, the “tofu eating wokerati” were reportedly rejoicing in an important victory for workers.
Over the last 20 years we, as an organisation that investigates and provides guidance and training on work behaviour, have had to adjust to various societal influences impacting and shaping the workplaces we’re working in; above all to how ideas like harassment and bullying have been viewed in the wider society, by the employers who pay us and by their people.
In 2019, I even published a book that centred on the question of how populism – more specifically how having someone like Donald Trump in charge of the Western world – would impact our work. My basic message was (and is) that business leaders need to set the standard; all of us need to hold ourselves accountable and do what we can to shape our environments.
But have we underestimated the impact of both declining trust in organisations and the proliferation of technology, which enables and encourages people to exist exclusively in their own cultural grouping or tribe?
Community conversations
In his last speech as President in 2016, Barack Obama implored people to engage in more conversations: “if you’re tired of arguing with strangers on the internet, try to talk with one in real life.”
In the book, I wanted this sort of conversation to happen at work – one of the few places in which we still interact (probably inevitably) with people who have different views to us.
It feels like polarisation may have eroded much of the shared sense of community that being employed by the same company once brought.”
From what I see now, I simply don’t think these conversations are happening. Instead, it feels like polarisation may have eroded much of the shared sense of community that being employed by the same company once brought.
We find in training sessions and discussions we facilitate or situations we’re asked to investigate that people are regularly ignoring the obligations of respect that they owe their colleagues.
This can happen most obviously in existential tensions, for example between the Trans community and people with gender critical views.
But it happens elsewhere too: white men (and people advocating for them) seem happy to say in front of their colleagues that they believe that people from minority backgrounds are being employed or promoted simply because they are from those backgrounds. What they’re saying is that they are being chosen over better qualified white men.
Sweeping generalisations are also made about different generations. No-one seems to focus on how this all might be landing for the colleagues.
So how can we take this forward? Here are three simple truths and three ideas that might help employers address the negative impacts of increasing polarisation:
- There is no right to free speech at work. If you’re in any doubt about that, read your employer’s Dignity at Work policy (or equivalent) and think about what words like consideration and respect mean.
- Employers owe every employee a duty to provide them with a safe system of work.
- At the heart of inclusion lies a very simple idea: that other people are different to us. Inclusion is about how we enable different people to thrive.
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If you want to reduce the negative impact of polarisation, here are three ideas to consider:
- Be clear about what you stand for. Your purpose and values need to be more than words on a wall. Your people (and anyone conducting investigations or making disciplinary recommendations on your behalf) need a benchmark they can use; something they can rely on in difficult spaces.
- In relation to bullying and harassment in particular, every organisation could take stock of where it is and of what it requires from its leaders in their leadership. It needs to give its people (and anyone who’s asked to investigate the behaviour of their people) clarity about where they see the line between “abrasive” and “abusive” behaviour.
- Finally, help people to develop the skills to disagree better. These skills are atrophying in the 21st century and our workplaces could certainly use them. You can try to create safe spaces for particular groups of employees, but that’s a sticking plaster. Focus on helping people to disagree better.
