Why bystanders hold the key to eliminating workplace harassment

The KeepWell Summit, Ibec’s flagship workplace wellbeing event, is returning in-person this year, after two years of virtual events.

Senior human resource directors, academics, wellbeing experts and business leaders will come together in Croke Park on June 29th to reflect on the pandemic, prepare for future challenges and tackle topical issues. The event will also see a number of expert speakers, both national and international, share best practice on implementing corporate wellbeing strategies that effectively improve the mental and physical wellbeing of employees in the workplace and their overall experience of work. With interactive workshops and dynamic discussions, the Summit will provide inspiration and food for thought to business leaders.

Addressing delegates as the Summit’s keynote speaker will be educator, film-maker and activist Jackson Katz, PhD, a renowned thought leader in the growing global movement of men working to promote gender equality and prevent gender violence. A key architect of what is known as the “bystander intervention” theory, Katz will speak on the importance of leadership in shaping a healthy, respectful and inclusive workplace.

According to Kara McGann, head of social policy at Ibec, the issue of gender inequality requires a whole of society approach if we are to tackle the causes at play and get to the foundation of such issues: “This will require education and awareness-raising from early years onwards, looking at what is accepted language and behaviour across society, including in the workplace, and an understanding of how both joking along or staying silent where misogynistic or sexist comments are made ultimately communicates acceptance or tacit approval.

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“CEO and senior leadership commitment to diverse, equal and respectful workplaces provides a necessary foundation for addressing gender inequality.”

Speaking in advance of the Summit, Katz noted that these issues are increasingly topical, but he emphasises that it is not a recent phenomenon.“The global pandemic of men’s violence against women is not a new problem and it’s pervasive and it’s global,” he states. In a post-#MeToo world, the discourse does not shy away from these issues but Katz was ahead of the curve on this. “I have been doing work on this since I was a university student back in the early 1980s. You could say it’s my life’s work.”

Katz has been brought into a wide range of organisations to provide education on how to improve gender equality and prevent gender-based violence in these settings. As well as workplaces, he has spoken at schools, universities and sports clubs, from elite professional athletes to youth sports and everything in between. He also created and directed the first system-wide gender violence prevention programme in the US military.

He says a paradigm shift in social norms is needed to dramatically decrease the rates of domestic violence, sexual violence, and sexual harassment in the workplace. He takes a less than benign view of the efforts to target certain perpetrators in the belief that this is making a difference.

“It’s not about individual pathology or toxicity. That’s a really misleading way that some people think about this subject - they think they need to ‘fix a man’,” he says. “It is a systemic and structural problem that manifests in individuals; of course individuals need to be held accountable for their behaviour. But the solution to the problem is not running from one individual to the next. When we look at sexism, misogyny and violence, to think that we will solve that problem, that is so deeply rooted in our culture and our society by individual interventions is just naive.”

According to Katz, men are an “incredibly important part of the solution” as well as a big part of the problem.

When we look at sexism, misogyny and violence, to think that we will solve that problem, that is so deeply rooted in our culture and our society by individual interventions is just naive

“A lot of men engage in behaviour that is problematic, behaviour that crosses lines, that can be harassing or abusive.” Yet many who do this don’t even realise what they are doing is unacceptable or wrong, he notes. “They think it’s normal. Some of this is generational but it’s not only generational because there are a lot of young men engaging in this incredibly abusive behaviour that they think is normal or acceptable.”

Katz proposes two solutions to these challenges, both of which he will outline at the KeepWell Summit. Firstly, it is fundamentally a leadership challenge: “Leaders in the workplace or any other setting have a disproportionate influence in setting the tone of what goes on in their domain.”

In the military, this is known as the “command climate”. “The person most responsible for the overall environment everyone operates in, is the commander.

Everyone else has a responsibility to behave appropriately but the commander has the ultimate responsibility for setting the tone in their command,” Katz explains. ‘’In the workplace, [it’s] the CEO, the director, the manager who has a disproportionate influence in setting the tone in that workplace about what is and isn’t acceptable, and what does or does not reflect the values of that organisation. The person in charge has more responsibility.”

Workplaces settings where sexism and sexual harassment is unacceptable will help with the broader societal change required: “Every part of society has to be on board with the changes we are talking about, and the workplace is one of the most important locations.”

The second part of the approach is the “bystander effect”. Katz explains that bystander is simply a synonym for colleague, friend, family member, teammate, or whomever it may be. He blames policing mechanisms within peer cultures that keep men silent even when they know something is wrong - if more bystanders spoke up when they observe wrongdoing, this would also bring about the fundamental shift in attitude required.

“Men want to be one of the guys,” he says. “The man who pulls someone aside to say that what they are saying or doing is wrong, that is an act of leadership. We need more men with the courage and the strength and the moral integrity to speak up. Bystander intervention is a way to get everyone in a given power culture or workplace to think about what responsibilities they have to themselves, to each other and to the organisations.”

People think it’s not their problem, because they don’t do those things. But it’s not enough in 2022 to say that ‘I don’t sexually harass women in the workplace, so therefore it’s not my issue’

The beauty of the bystander intervention is that it moves beyond the perpetrator-victim binary, Katz says. “Rather than focusing on the person doing it and the person experiencing it, it focuses on all the people around them and gives people an idea of why they should be doing something and gives them concrete options of things to do in those circumstances.”

Essentially, he views it as a shared responsibility. “People think it’s not their problem, because they don’t do those things. But it’s not enough in 2022 to say that ‘I don’t sexually harass women in the workplace, so therefore it’s not my issue’. It’s about what you are doing in your workplace to prevent it from happening or to respond to it when it does happen.”

Jackson Katz, PhD will speak at the Ibec KeepWell Summit, which takes place in Croke Park on June 29th. For more information and booking, visit ibec.ie/keepwellsummit22