Joe Fuller: Workplace sexual harassment is a complex and widespread problem. In addition to the personal toll, it can derail careers, it can depress an organization’s productivity and morale and damage its reputation. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, many businesses are thinking deeply about how to address the issue and are looking for new solutions. Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast. I’m Harvard Business School professor and visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute Joe Fuller. I’m joined today by attorney Ally Coll and tech entrepreneur Neta Meidav. Coll is cofounder and president of the Purple Campaign, a nonprofit working to change business practices and public policy. To encourage progress, the Purple Campaign is introducing a corporate certification program. They’re piloting the effort with Uber, Airbnb, Expedia, and Amazon. Meidav is cofounder of startup Vault, whose platform makes it easier to report and track harassment, in part, by including features that address considerations that made victims reluctant to file reports. Our guests are addressing workplace sexual harassment through blended innovations in management, communications, advocacy, and technology. It’s a monumental task. How do you break down a systemic cultural phenomenon through a managerial intervention? How do you ensure fairness and craft appropriate responses? And how can companies extend such protections in workplaces that increasingly include employees of third parties and contingent workers? Ally and Neta, welcome to Harvard Business School.

Ally Coll: Thanks so much for having us.

Neta Meidav: Thank you.

Fuller: Harassment in the workplace has been very, very widely discussed, and, obviously, since the advent of the #MeToo campaign, has become a major topic in corporate board rooms and on campuses and in the media. Could you just both tell me how you got involved in this? Ally?

Coll: Sure. So I was working as a lawyer in private practice when the movement went viral in October 2017. The news was reporting that my law firm and the chairman of my firm, David Boies, had been representing [Harvey] Weinstein and The Weinstein Company in connection with some of these issues. And so that prompted for me and for our firm both a kind of internal and external questioning around what the role of lawyers is in this movement and also what kinds of workplace policies and practices like those that were being exposed about The Weinstein Company had led to this problem and how best to address it.

Fuller: And Neta?

Meidav: It built on my own personal experience in my first-ever job out of university, my dream job. And I never thought of reporting harassment. For me, the answer was to leave. But months later, I found out that there was an additional colleague of mine who was harassed by the same individual. But it was too late for me—my life continued outside of that specific workplace. I had a career in government, in the British government. I was a climate-change negotiator and later heading investor relations for renewable energy and never thought I would become an entrepreneur. And when my husband asked me if I had done something differently today in the wake of the #MeToo movement, I said, “Well, today I would have done because today I know I’m not the only one. And that changes everything.” And that was the moment when we realized that actually could technology connect the dots for people and help a better way of reporting misconduct. And that triggered that journey for me.

Fuller: So you and he started a company called Vault. Could you tell us a little bit about it and what its key features are?

Meidav: There is a huge deficit of trust in the workplace, and the problem is very much rooted in the fact that there aren’t satisfactory misconduct reporting channels internally that are really up to date and provide value both to employees and to employers. Vault is an end-to-end platform that has an employee-facing app, which allows people to create safe timestamp records on their phones, including saving any hard evidence that they might have. And when it comes to reporting, there are different options to boost the confidence and empower people to come forward. One of them—and very uniquely to our technology—is GoTogether, which allows people to speak up and to submit their record under the condition they’re not the first or only one to do so. So our technology connects the dots on these repeated patterns of harm, allowing individuals to have strength in numbers and more confidence, allowing companies to identify these repeated patterns of harm before they become tomorrow’s news or lawsuit.

Fuller: So when I fill out a report, it originates with me, the employee who’s got a complaint to make. Can I hold it back and save it for later, or does it automatically flow through to the company—and to whom in the company?

Meidav: Absolutely. You can hold back, and you’re in control of that data until the minute you decide to come forward and submit it. So even if you decide to come forward a long time after it happened, you would always have the proof of when you’ve started taking this record because of the timestamping technology. The idea is really to work hand-in-hand with this growing trend of employee ownership of their data and provide a safe space and psychological safety in creating this digital space for that specific record.

Fuller: So Neta is creating a tool to try to help employees. Ally, you’ve taken a different approach and tried to create a much broader protocol for advising companies and motivating companies to adopt best practice. Could you tell us a little bit about The Purple Campaign?

Coll: Yeah. As these news stories were breaking across every industry about workplace harassment, I was really inspired by the conversation that was being started about an issue that I, myself, too have experienced in the workplace, but that had largely remained untalked-about for so long. But I also, as a lawyer and as somebody with a background in public policy, I wanted to make sure that this was a moment not just of awareness-raising about the problem, but one that resulted in actual written-down policy change, both in terms of workplace policies and in terms of public policy. I also was here at Harvard Law School when the Title IX debate was really raging on campus, and I learned a lot from that experience about how complex policymaking around sexual misconduct can be. So it’s important to me that this is a moment that also translates into the right kind of thought-through policy change. So The Purple Campaign, I launched it in January of 2018. And our mission is to address workplace harassment by implementing stronger corporate policies, establishing better laws, and empowering people to create lasting change in their own workplaces and communities.

Fuller: What are the types of policy changes you’re advocating? Because I think pre-Weinstein, pre-#MeToo, companies would have said, “We have got policies in place, we’ve got reporting mechanisms, we’ve got, in some instances, history of acting against people who have engaged in this type of reprehensible behavior.” What needs to happen beyond what they had in place?

Coll: I think #MeToo revealed that the system that we all thought was working, both in terms of the legal requirements and in terms of internal approaches, was really broken. We think of it in three parts. One is prevention. How do you stop these issues from occurring in the first place? And that means more-effective trainings. Most workplaces have had your typical compliance-oriented sexual harassment training. But I think we’ve seen in this current moment that those have generally failed to address the more-nuanced gray-area interactions that #MeToo is bringing to the surface. And then, how do you create greater transparency? So we saw in cases like The Weinstein Company that many employers were addressing these issues by settling lawsuits confidentially and including clauses that prevented people from speaking about the misconduct, which often allowed the employer to not take corrective action and not actually address the underlying problems. So we’re advocating for more transparency around process and to allow people to speak about these issues when they come up, and then making sure companies are responding appropriately when issues do come up. So we know this is a very underreported problem. In 2016, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission did a study that found that 70 percent of people still won’t report workplace harassment to a manager or a supervisor in the first place, so companies don’t even know about most of the problems that are happening, which makes it hard for them to address. And then creating fair internal procedures for when issues do arise—more independent investigation protocols, a more structured approach to determining corrective action and making sure that’s really commensurate with the offense.

Fuller: Let’s unpack that a little bit. Let’s start with the issue of reporting mechanisms and what’s effective and what isn’t.

Meidav: What is really mind-blowing is that companies choose today, leadership chooses today, by having this kind of checkbox solution of a hotline in place as the solution for their speak-up culture—they’re really outsourcing that trust somewhere else. And employees are expected to report one of the most devastating events that might’ve happened to them in their lives—be it harassment or bullying or discrimination—as if they are raising a question about payroll. So what we’re trying to do with technology is to empower a trusted communication channel between employees and employers, between the team—the internal team that is supposed to be dealing with these issues—and ensure that people are empowered to speak up.

Fuller: But the original logic, it struck me, was that you wanted an outside resource. It would be intimidating to tell your employer that there was something happening, particularly related to a superior. How do you balance the intrinsic anxiety people have—about essentially complaining about something in the employment environment—and trust—which is presumably lacking if something bad could happen to me in that environment?

Coll: Yeah. I think the first thing that needs to happen is employers need to open up as many channels for reporting misconduct as they can. So I think having options for allowing anonymous reporting, options for a hotline, but also empowering and training multiple individuals within the company who are designated to take these reports so that ... Oftentimes the advice has been, “Go to your manager or supervisor.” Well, often that person could be the problem. That may not be the first person you want to have that conversation with. So training people in, for example, not only your HR department, but also your diversity and inclusion team, or people who sit across different sectors of your workforce, I think, is really important to allowing people to come forward. A lot of companies that we work with now have an open-door philosophy that they train people on, that’s in their employee handbook, that says you should feel comfortable raising an issue with anybody within the company with whom you feel comfortable doing so. But then you need to make sure those people are ready to respond and have those conversations in a way that is appropriate and helpful. And then I think having third-party technologies like Vault, like others that are popping up in this space, can also help rebuild this trust, where, to your point, many people don’t trust the company, because they’ve seen that HR in the past has sometimes been looking out for the corporate interest as opposed to that of the employee. So we need to rebuild this trust. And that really, at the end of the day, depends on leadership taking these issues seriously when they do arise, I think.

Fuller: One of the things you both have referred to is underreporting. Why do you think this is underreported?

Meidav: Well, again, it’s back to that trust issue. We know that actually over 90 percent of people who withhold their disclosure are quoting fear as the main element. It’s about how you create that psychological safety. There will be people who would feel comfortable coming forward directly. There will be people who would prefer to do that anonymously. And we found that people, and especially women, are up to eight times more likely to report with GoTogether than any other options.

Coll: One reason many people don’t report is the fear that they won’t be believed. And we know that this is an intersectional problem. So women of color, for example, are not only more likely to be targets of harassment, but less likely to be believed when they come forward to report. There’s also a lack of willingness to report where people see that harassment is endemic to the workplace, and they don’t believe the company is actually going to do anything about it. And that’s largely because retaliation is still so prevalent. So the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that 75 percent of people who did report to a manager or supervisor experienced some form of retaliation in response. So that could be getting less-favorable work assignments, being ostracized socially, or more severe forms of retaliation like being fired from your job. These things are still happening. And so people have had a lot of reasons to be wary about the adverse career consequences that might come as a result of reporting. And I think that’s sort of the double-edged sword of #MeToo, is that it raised awareness about this problem, but it also showed that was true for many people who did come forward and found themselves now out of a job or in a completely different industry from the one they started their career in.

Fuller: One of the other concepts you’ve raised earlier is a concept of fairness, as it affects both the person filing the complaint and the object of the complaint. That is getting increasing conversation in the public domain. How do you view that, and how do you create a system that acknowledges that there are maybe different perspectives at play here that are deserving of attention?

Coll: Yeah. I mean, that actually raises one other reason many people are fearful to report—especially smaller, less egregious issues—is that I think in those cases people really just want the behavior to stop. They want to be able to work in a safe and productive work environment. And sometimes I think, where companies use the term “zero tolerance” or take too extreme of an approach, it can actually deter reporting, because people don’t necessarily want the person to get fired, but they would like the company to take some other corrective action—for example, coaching or counseling—that can address the problem in a more productive way that allows both parties to continue to keep their jobs and work together. So I think in order to encourage reporting, it’s important for companies to really think about what are their investigation procedures and corrective action procedures, make sure they’re fair, make sure they’re ones all parties are going to trust, and to educate people about that as a part of their training. A lot of the typical workplace harassment trainings just explain what’s illegal, but they don’t explain, “Here at the company, here’s our commitment to how we’re going to investigate and address these problems.” And I think creating more transparency and clarity around that can go a long way.

Fuller: Are you seeing new types of training or a new approach to training that’s more impactful and actually speaks to what people need to know?

Coll: Absolutely. This is one of our main priorities at The Purple Campaign. One of our corporate partners is Airbnb, and they have developed an in-house training that their general counsel has personally delivered with their employees around the globe in small group settings. And unlike your typical compliance-oriented approach, it really is about that particular company. He invokes their mission—which is to create a sense of belonging wherever people are in the world—and he connects that to the fact that it’s hard to do that if you don’t feel a sense of belonging when you come into work every day. When you hear that message delivered by a senior leader in the company on your very first week of the job, everybody in that room is paying attention. Nobody is on their phones. And that includes the people who don’t see themselves as a potential target of harassment or a potential perpetrator. I think there’s new research out that shows that, if you approach employees as potential perpetrators, that can actually have backlash effects—in fact, leading to fewer women in management in the company and a whole series of other trickle-out effects.

Fuller: Certainly one thing we’ve seen in a number of areas of research in our Managing the Future of Work project is that, not just the signals and the statements of senior management, but the observable behavior of senior management is incredibly important in terms of validating various behaviors, whether it’s the importance of work-life balance, or perhaps in this domain as well.

Meidav: Leadership must address it, yes, from the top, and be engaged. But they need to think about the factory floor. They need to think about the trading floor. They need to think about reaching offices everywhere. Let’s assume I’m a junior employee in a company, and I’ve just experienced something truly devastating with immediate impact on my life. Would that help me to know that the company will increase female representation on its board from 20 percent to 30 percent immediately? No. What would help me is if my voice is heard.

Coll: I do think that having more diversity in leadership—both in terms of gender diversity, but also more broadly—is a really important part of the solution to this problem. There’s an implicit bias exercise called the Trusted 10 that asks people to list the people that you trust the most in the world and then list characteristics about them. So what’s their race, sex, age, where did they grow up, where did they go to school? And what you find is that people tend to trust people who share characteristics with you. So if we’re thinking about this as a trust issue—and a major reason people won’t report is they don’t trust the company—I do think it can help rebuild that trust and make people feel more comfortable that their issues are going to be taken seriously when they see themselves reflected in leadership. And that needs to be not only on the boards of directors, but to Neta’s point, all the way on down to the managers who they might actually be reporting these issues to in real life.

Fuller: Let’s also think about this through the lens of emerging business models. Ally, you mentioned Airbnb. There is a rapid growth of what, historically, were called nontraditional or contingent work relationships, gig economy, significant structural shift toward part-time work in the United States, post the Great Recession. When you’ve got full-time employees on your trading floor, on your factory floor, your ability to impose policies on them and observe their behavior’s a lot greater than if you’re talking about an Airbnb or even a company like Toptal or Catalant that may be delivering white-collar, highly paid workers for temporary employment in companies. How does that factor into policy? How does that factor into the way we should be thinking about this going forward?

Coll: I think we’ve seen that even the policies that just apply to traditional employees have fallen short in some areas. But more broadly, #MeToo has exposed that those policies failed to apply to a lot of the interactions that people find themselves in the workplace. So the gig economy and the issues that Uber and Lyft have been grappling with, with their drivers and riders, is one example of that. Another example is in the venture capital community, where most of the stories that came out about harassment involved not two employees of the same VC firm, but a VC firm employee and a prospective portfolio company employee, or an entrepreneur or a founder. And so there’s been a lot of work done in those industries, which I give them credit for, to really think about how do we take our existing approaches and make sure that it protects, especially the interactions where the power dynamics are most extreme, which in the funding context is often not between two employees.

Fuller: How does this play out globally, and what kind of challenges does that constitute in terms of coming up with solutions that travel across borders?

Meidav: The same way that the regulatory landscape is changing in the States, it’s changing elsewhere as well. So we’re seeing banning the use of NDAs is now heavily debated in the British government, as well as a new code of practice on employers that will come out soon, published by the Equality and Human Rights Commission in the UK, putting new requirements on employers to stamp out harassment from the workplace and ensure that they have better procedures and processes in place, including—there will be a, we expect—a nod to reporting as well as training and other issues.

Coll: Yeah. And #MeToo is a global movement, but that is causing a lot of challenges, especially for global companies—where there’s a lot of pressure from perhaps one country to change policies and practices to come up to speed in the United States, for example—with very rapidly changing state and local law requirements, where the culture and the law in another office may not require that. And so it’s something organizations are grappling with—how to create one cohesive policy that accommodates cultural norms. One interesting thing that I heard recently was from a company who has a Scandinavian office where privacy is really, really central as a value. And so this idea of, to what extent is the company governing interactions outside of the office was a hot button issue. Whereas in the United States, that’s actually something there’s a lot of pressure on companies to do. And that’s coming into tension with some cultural norms in other offices.

Fuller: There’s always a question on matters like this, as to whether or not it should be regulated or there should be some type of code of conduct, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, or whether a company should be adopting a global set of practices that recognizes its legal and regulatory obligations. Ally, at The Purple Campaign, you’ve been working on a certification concept. Could you speak to that?

Coll: Yeah, so our main initiative on the workplace front is to develop a corporate certification that will recognize employers who are taking steps, beyond just legal compliance, to address this issue. And the goal is really to create a shared set of norms and expectations. Even in the United States where the laws are generally the same, there is a huge disparity in terms of what companies are doing on this issue right now. In some states, they’re required to do very sophisticated training. In other states, there’s no training requirement at all. So we’re aiming to, as a third-party organization, identify what is a set of policy and practical changes that companies should be making, and then to use that as a way to incentivize employers to go above and beyond the bare-minimum legal compliance, and also to make it a competitive business issue. We’re seeing more and more that employees are willing to make decisions about where to work based on corporate culture. So to that end, we believe certification, which has been a good model in the LEED [US Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design] context, in the LGBTQ Plus policy context with the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, they’ve been levers to incentivize employers to change in ways that go beyond just what the law requires.

Fuller: Are there levers to oblige companies to meet a certain standard? Or are they really there to provoke companies to reflect on what they can be doing?

Coll: So our idea is to identify a set of criteria that we believe creates a holistic approach to this problem. I believe you can’t solve reporting without solving investigation procedures, for example. So we’re looking at a set of six to eight topics that we think each one of which needs to be addressed, and to identify what is it that companies should be doing to get this right. So what does an effective training look like? What do effective reporting structures look like? And then to reward the companies that go ahead and put in place those practices by sharing with the talent market and with the consumer market that they are an employer who’s taking this issue seriously and who’s gone above and beyond the bare minimum legal requirement.

Fuller: Let’s talk about human resources functions for a second. Historically, they come in for a lot of criticism by employees and operators, as if they’re supposed to make any problem related to any human being in the company go away or be satisfied. But they have been, historically, the function that had the obligation to cover this along, often, with their colleagues in the legal function. When you think about best practices at the level of human resources, what are they? And does HR deserve the kind of bad rap it’s been getting in this area?

Coll: With the growth of diversity and inclusion teams and more integration between HR or people teams and the D&I teams, we’re seeing a shift in what that role is. I think human resources was often seen as a part of legal, right, and a compliance-oriented office. And now we’re seeing it be one that obviously needs to address those issues, but also is taking on a responsibility of broader cultural shifts in workplaces. Another thing one company that we work with has done, which I really like, is it has created what they’ve called “People Team Ambassadors” who sit in, integrated into other teams, so that if there’s a particular project team, putting somebody on that project team who has a background or a training in people operations can really help people feel more comfortable coming forward about issues as well, because there’s somebody they know and trust and who they work with day-to-day.

Fuller: You’ve both raised the issue of transparency and the focus on NDAs by both regulators and companies as to their legitimacy efficacy. How should we be thinking about NDA, specifically, in the broader question of transparency?

Coll: Most people, I do believe, will prefer to resolve these issues quietly and outside the court system. Litigation is not a realistic option for many people who can’t afford that. And the barriers that exist to speaking up internally in the company become even greater when you’re talking about filing a public lawsuit or speaking to the press about what happened to you. That being said, I think this moment has exposed the nefarious side of the NDA and the practice of forced arbitration, which is that it’s had the effect of shielding companies from transparency around whether they’ve actually addressed the underlying problems. We need to find the right balance in this moment of ensuring that people who experience workplace harassment are not disadvantaged as a result of that. One concern I have, too, with NDAs is that you see people go try to find another job, and they’re prohibited from speaking about the conditions under which they left their last job. And we talk a lot about the resume gap in the context of parental leave or in other—think about how does somebody go move on from an experience like this, where they need to be able to talk about what happened, and they need to be able to explain that they weren’t fired from the company or underperforming, but actually, through no fault of their own, experienced something that left them out of a job. Nondisclosure agreements and forced arbitration are two issues that we’re looking at very closely. A lot of tech companies have already voluntarily done away with those practices, and a couple of states have banned the use of them. So it’s a trend that’s moving forward on its own, fortunately, but certainly something we’d want to codify through certification.

Fuller: Well, as you look out in your collective experience studying this issue, working with employers in this issue, what are the three or four factors that you think indicate success or progress? And are there other examples of companies or institutions that you think of have done things that speak to how we should be responding to these issues?

Meidav: The first thing would be, as we discussed, shifting the conversation from compliance to culture, because in the wake of #MeToo, employees do not demand better compliance, they do demand better culture. Secondly, putting an advanced reporting solution in place, putting the best engaging training solution in place—these are the things that could really move the needle if you want your employees to speak up. Finally, what we’re really trying to do here is harness the power of technology to create a behavioral change. So how do we do that? We want to ensure that when you put a tool like Vault in place, you get an uptake in reporting in the first couple of years, and that’s understandable. But what you would like to see over time is a decline. And the decline reflects the fact that culture has changed and behavior has changed.

Coll: And I’ll do something I’m not often in a position to do, which is give Congress a little bit of credit for what they have done. My background is in politics, and one of my personal experiences with harassment was on the Hill. And as these stories exposed a very broken system and Congress for handling these issues, they really looked holistically at the system and took a bipartisan approach to top-to-bottom change of the kind that I think is really needed. So they identified the fact that their existing policies didn’t apply to particular stakeholders, like interns and fellows, and they expanded their policies to apply to them. They’ve opened up all of these different options for people when they do come forward. So you have the choice to bring a civil lawsuit. You also have the choice to go through an internal mediation-arbitration process. There’s a whole range of corrective action procedures that create accountability, including actually personal liability for members who engage in harassment. I think it’s already having a huge impact.

Fuller: One last question. Let me start with you Ally. Are you optimistic about the way this is unfolding? And how will we know we’re making real progress?

Coll: I’m absolutely optimistic. I think it requires leaders, in all sectors, keeping their eye on the ball. And we can’t become complacent as a moment where #MeToo has happened and now everybody feels comfortable speaking up. But I do think that this moment is one where we’re seeing serious cultural change, and we’re seeing leaders who are willing to invest their time and their resources in getting this right in a way that just wasn’t the case before. So that makes me very hopeful.

Meidav: I’m seeing, from my seat as leading this company, a huge shift from where we were only six to nine months ago. So I would enter a meeting, and pitching this to heads of people, heads of compliance. And I would leave those meetings sweating, because I felt like there was so much education that needs to be done. And “Why is it good for you to have a speak-up culture? Why is it good for you to know more? Why you don’t want to cover up these issues?” And today, we’re getting phone calls because employers out there are seeking a solution.

Fuller: Neta Meidav of Vault Platform and Ally Coll of the Purple Campaign, thank you for joining us on the Managing the Future of Work podcast.

Coll: Thanks so much for having us.

Meidav: Thank you. Really appreciate the opportunity.

Fuller: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Managing the Future of Work podcast. To find out more about our project on the future of work, visit our website at hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work.