A few years ago, an HR director told me about a staff meeting that still bothers her. A junior employee made a small, shaky comment about “certain jokes” in the warehouse. The room shifted. People glanced at each other, someone cracked a new joke, and the meeting moved on. Everyone
A few years ago, a café owner told me about the morning she opened an email from HR with the subject line: “Harassment complaint.” She wasn’t running a giant corporation. She was juggling schedules, ordering beans, and stepping in at the register when the line got long. Now she was
I once sat with someone who told me about the night her life tilted a little. Nothing dramatic. No sirens. No big scene. Just a quiet drive home after an incident of sexual misconduct at work. She parked in front of her house, turned off the engine, and stayed there.
When employees talk about the moment they stopped trusting a manager, it is rarely about one explosive incident. It is the meeting where a supervisor mocked someone in front of the team and nobody spoke up. The late-night message that said, “You know your job depends on me, right?” The
I still remember sitting with a manager who had just received a serious complaint. His hands were shaking slightly as he said, “I thought I was being direct. I had no idea they felt humiliated.” He was not a cartoon villain. He was a high performer who had never been
The first time a friend showed me her “just in case” screenshot folder, we were sitting at her kitchen table. She scrolled through messages from a coworker who kept pushing the line: late-night DMs, comments about her appearance, then jokes that turned into thinly veiled insults when she did not
When I think about workplace abuse, I do not start with legal clauses or policy templates. I think of a manager who once sat across from me, eyes tired, saying, “I think my team is scared of one supervisor, but no one will speak on the record.” The company had
A manager once told me about a staff member who had started sitting near the door in every meeting. When she asked why, he hesitated, then finally said, “I like knowing I can leave if he starts again.” “Starts what?” she asked. “Comments. Touching my shoulder. Jokes about my body.
The first time an employee talked to me about gender-based misconduct, it was not part of a formal complaint. We were at a small table near the break room. She opened her phone, scrolled through chat screenshots, and said, “It started as little comments. Now I feel sick when I
The first time an employee told me she wanted to file a complaint, she came into my office with a crumpled sticky note. On it were a date, a short quote, and the name of a manager. She turned it over in her hands and said, “If I say this
