Workplace misconduct is at an all time high — and HR doesn’t know how to fix it

Employees feel unsafe at work, and when they go to HR with complaints, they’re being brushed aside.

Fifty-one percent of U.S. office workers have suffered from workplace misconduct, including bullying, sexual harassment, discrimination, fraud or bribery, according to the recent Trust Gap report conducted by incident report service Vault Platform. Forty-eight percent of those who have reported instances of misconduct say they’ve experienced it as frequently as once a month.

Despite the frequency of these incidencies, HR is not taking quick action to prevent or punish misconduct: more than a third of U.S. office workers said they believe their organization would brush aside at least one form of workplace misconduct, and 30% of HR and compliance decision makers agreed that their organization would ignore an instance of misconduct if it was set to damage profits or reputation, the report found.

“People are experiencing misconduct and organizations know that misconduct is taking place and that they don't have a handle on it,” says Tori Reichman, chief customer officer at Vault Platform. “There's some slow movement to do something about it but we haven't crossed that chasm yet.”

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The pandemic and the subsequent shift to a virtual work environment has played a pivotal role in the rise in behavioral misconduct, particularly sexual harassment — more than one in four employees say they have experienced unwelcome sexual behavior online since the start of COVID-19, according to a survey conducted by global learning tech company Epignosis and non-profit The Purple Campaign.

Reporting incidences of harassment and misconduct has become a headache for HR leaders, because of outdated methods, Reichman says. Employers still rely on more passive forms of reporting that fail to come full circle and bring closure to reporters of misconduct.

Instead, the Vault Platform allows employees to virtually report — both anonymously and not — instances of workplace misconduct directly to their employer. The two dominant types of workplace misconduct being reported through Vault are behavioral misconduct, like sexual harassment, bullying and discrimination, and corporate misconduct, which includes conflicts of interest, theft and fraud.

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“What legacy systems lack is the ability to follow up and to close the loop with reporters — let them know that they have heard their concern and they’ve conducted an investigation, regardless of the outcome,” Reichman says. “That goes a long way for strengthening trust with employees.”

So, what will it take to enact real change? A new perspective.

Employers need to first foster an environment where employees feel safe to report workplace misconduct, and then update the means by which they do it. This ensures that when employees do report, they are empowered by the act, not discouraged by the process. Often, the largest deterrent for employees isn’t whether they want to report or not, but whether it will be a smooth process.

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“You need both those things to be able to build trust with employees,” Riechman says. “[You need to say that] speaking up is not only welcome in this organization but encouraged.”

Employing services — such as Vault Platform — that prioritize the reporter’s safety and comfort is going to be one of employers’ biggest tools in the fight toward more equitable workplaces. Employees need to have multiple avenues to express their concerns, including the option to report at different levels of anonymity, the ability to withhold information until there’s a better process in place, and an understanding that next steps will be taken.

“[Employers] really have to be willing to put something in the employee's hands that says if something happens, we want you to tell us,” Reichman says. “By pushing what your policies are around misconduct, it helps employees understand their experiences much more easily than they otherwise would.”