One thing that every employee needs to understand is that HR is not your friend. No matter how friendly or helpful they seem, their job is not to protect you. It's to protect the company.
In this case I'm completely bewildered as to why HR handled this particular situation so clumsily.
Yes, in theory. But most HRs "protect the org" in the most short sighted way possible
We do HR software, I've interacted with many HR people at many companies and I've never even heard of anything as outrageous as the behavior described in this case. In no way is it the way"most HRs" behave.
Though I still believe it must be because many (if not most) firms invest very little in their HR departments and hence they get what they pay for and employees make do with it until something blows up; e.g. scenarios like this. And I am sure there are stellar HR departments out there I have never interacted with.
But then again an industry, a field, or a practice is usually stereotyped based on the reputation of the majority and majority in this case, in my humble opinion, seems to be lying somewhere down south.
But that's my point. If Uber's HR properly cared about protecting the company's hide, they would have immediately disciplined the manager involved, and "sexually propositioning a first-day direct report" is so egregiously over the line that they would have fired the manager.
Uber's HR failed here not because they only cared about protecting the company's hide, but because they didn't.
So, they just don't care about employees
Like any department, HR should be staffed with intelligent, values-driven leaders with the spine to take strong perspectives and the ability to form collaborative vs. transactional relationships with the business. Constantly saying "yes" and failing to push back or take principled stands is not collaborative. Yet that is what many young companies want out of their HR department. I've found this more true in young(er) tech companies, though my sample size is limited.
When you build your HR function as a transactional service center, you get short-sighted decision-making.
That's all just my professional opinion.
This, well, this is what the dark side can be. Of course, at the end of the day it depends on the org and the kind of people we let grow, if the people in our org are good, capable then it is fine, but from the words of that HR friend of my friend, that's the job of HR.
They have a management chain just like everyone else, and if the person at the top (or the person above them) says "We're not going to discipline this guy" then the best HR can do is try to deescalate the situation.
If Edward had to do it, we do too.
That's definitely not the case in my experience. I spent a few months at Fitbit before being harassed by a manager, Sam Trychin. All I wanted to do was do my work, be treated fairly, and not be harassed. HR was definitely not the place to go.
As soon as I made the complaint, Jade Curtis at HR had a meeting with me where she lied to my face (claimed all their managers are exactly the same when I had gone around asking other employees and explicitly confirmed my manager was not following company policy or even treating me fairly compared to his other team members), told me they would refuse to transfer me when I asked about solutions like that, and asserted that the solution was I had to talk more.
The next week they brought me in a fired me with never a written or even verbal warning, and never a negative performance review or a missed meeting, or even a late JIRA implementation. Indeed, everyone said good things about my performance. I had also followed her advice to "talk more". Again they refused to entertain any option of continuing at the company when I offered to try anything that would solve things.
The only thing Fitbit HR cared about was A) to get as much ammunition for a lawsuit as possible, and B) fire me as fast as possible after I was harassed. They didn't try at all to solve things at the company.
In terms of what happened, everything was fairly normal for a couple months. Then one day my wife drove me in to the office because my back was hurting and standing an hour on the BART made things even worse. We followed every rule for her to be in the building. We arrived at 8am after a 2 hour drive, waiting until the front desk was open at 8:30am and got her a badge, then proceeded to my desk which is safely outside all the signs indicating no guests are allowed due to unreleased projects being worked on.
The developer to my right was super friendly and talkative and awesome to my wife - completely normal. My manager came in later (he was rarely around and always left early at 4pm, one of those pre-IPO people who don't put any effort in now that they have their options) and blew up after 10 minutes - super strange. His face turned all red and he was breathing heavy and he took me aside to a private room. He said my wife is too distracting for him to get any work done and she has to move.
We immediately left the area and went to the couches across from the front desk to figure out what to do. Then I took her off campus. She never visited again any day after that (who would bring their wife back when their manager is acting creepy toward her?), but my manager continually blew up about her and made up new rules about her. For example, the week after, he took me aside to a private room again and said she couldn't visit ever again. Meanwhile when other team member's family visited, he was super nice and even booked a conference room for a full day for another team member's kids to visit.
At the same time he started treating me very unfairly. For example, he said any exercise on my part counted as a "long lunch" and wasn't allowed. Meanwhile it was "Steptember" and all employees were encouraged to exercise and had internal teams competing with who could do the most exercise.
Similarly I was in an automatic activity tracking beta test, and all short exercises had failed to trigger the new logic, so I took a 1 hour bike ride on the Embarcadero instead of lunch to try to get a positive result for my beta test data - he blew up about this as well.
The manager claimed the PM had been trying to contact me all day and wasn't able to because I took that bike ride. This was not true. The PM Hipchatted me on the way back from the bike ride, I stopped at a cafe on the way back, and did the code review the PM wanted from me immediately, within 10 minutes.
So the manager was lying about my interaction with the PM to justify his not letting me exercise and his blowing up any time I was away from my desk - which I had to be pretty often because I was writing the Bluetooth pairing code and there's a step that aborts if there are too many devices nearby, like at our desks. The test group lead actually worked from home at least one day a week for precisely this reason and I was only working down the hall at some tables, which should not have been a problem.
Meanwhile everyone else at the company I talked to encouraged exercise, and one manager I talked to even recommended an afternoon nap for getting your energy back to code some more! So my manager was definitely not following company policy or treating me fairly. All HR cared about was firing me, though. I found out later the manager was divorced and that's probably why he went nuts over my wife.
It actually sounds really similar to Susan Fowler's experience at Uber. She had a manager acting creepy and weird because of his own marital issues. Then HR invented fake "undocumented performance issues" that were never communicated before and didn't hold up to scrutiny when other employees were asked about it, so that HR could deny transfer and any other solutions, and the manager could keep looking good at the company.
Apart from potentially being difficult emotionally there are tons of negative outcomes that could come from taking the legal route
Here's a list of potential negative outcomes of lawyering up:
* getting terminated (remember, at-will employment) * getting blacklisted by other teams at your current employer * getting blacklisted by potential future employers. Court cases are often public and in some industries companies are forced to make ongoing litigation public * having your weird texts, emails, personal life and sexual history being dragged out in a public court case * losing and still having to pay all those lawyer fees * winning but not getting any meaningful compensation * getting harassed on twitter/wherever by the alt-right/gamergate crowd.
Yes, people should be getting in trouble but it's a prisoners dilemma where each individual victim is not incentiviced to do anything.
So you can imagine how many multiples of that it is when you're trying to rock the boat on harassment.
What is the better way then, beside leaving the company despite doing your job very well?
Aren't most of these potential negative outcomes of suing, not lawyering up?
Having a conversation with a lawyer who specializes in employment law to get a temperature-check on your specific situation (does it qualify as harassment, what are your options, what are likely outcomes of exercising these options given precedent case law, etc) will not result in "having your weird texts, emails, personal life and sexual history being dragged out in a public court case".
Even if you do sue, most lawsuits (especially discrimination ones) are settled out of court, without lascivious details being made public.
You're kind-of right, but suing only has teeth if you're prepared to go to court and not bluffing. Engaging a lawyer without suing is just going to cost you money. All of the things I said still suck if you're going through depositions, even if everything isn't being made public. Imagine having to sit in a room full of lawyers and explain why you replied 'haha' to an inappropriate text instead of "I'm forwarding this to HR right now."
Consider that the people who are wronged in these situations didn't set themselves those days to be harassed. Now they should not only stand what's been done to them, but also drop everything they were doing that day to sue? I think there's an understandable tradeoff that people go thru in those circumstance. They push the issue as seems appropriate in term of benefit/time. Where that line lies depends on the situation, the people involved and how much they enjoy spending their time litigating instead of doing XYZ other thing.
Lots of people don't even bother going through the hurdle of reporting to HR, being interviewed, being questioned, being doubted, having to spend hours or days handling the issue, instead of doing their work. Bringing that to the next level: not many people desire to spend their time suing instead of doing whatever it is they'd rather do with their time.
Arguably, issues should be pursued to educate and deter. But up until which point? I think you'll agree that it's understandable why someone would choose that reporting to HR was enough and suing wasn't worth the trouble.
If you wish to take it to court yourself, then they may also be able to provide you with or help you find an appropriate lawyer for the case.
Unions can have benefits sometimes, but handling issues related to harassment is not one.
> They will be able to represent you anonymously at first, and bring a collective action against the perpetrator if there have been multiple incidents against multiple victims.
Or, if the perpetrator is a peer but holds a position of power within the union, they may simply decide to ignore you, as HR did in this case.
If you speak out against the union rep's decision (such as by writing a blog post like this), and the union's charter has a clause prohibiting public opposition to the union (which is legal and very common), then you could get your membership terminated. This not only means you lose your current job, but you could effectively get blacklisted across the industry if there are no non-union shops. Unlike shared employer blacklists, which are illegal, this is perfectly legal because the union isn't sharing a blacklist - they just so happen to have a monopoly on hiring and also have the legal right to refuse you membership.
Ironically, it would be illegal for the company to fire you in this position, but unions have far fewer restrictions on whether or not they can deny or terminate membership, even in retaliation.
In theory. And disciplining or terminating employees who expose the company to well-documented, open-and-shut lawsuits is an HR bread and butter issue. Yet here we are.
If you really want someone who will be legally bound to represent you without conflict of interest, and with legal protection against retaliation, you want a lawyer, not a union rep. And you can do that with or without a union. (And employment attorneys already operate on contingency for most straightforward cases like these).
Are you based outside the US? Unions aren't particularly prevalent in the US, at least not in professional fields.
Seemed like a fine solution, but it soon became evident that she had, in fact, been blacklisted: 18 months passed before anybody would even give her an interview, and that was only after deciding to change industries altogether. That silver parachute was, in hindsight, wholly inadequate compensation. Meanwhile her harasser has continued his career with no repercussions whatsoever.
When these problems are cultural / institutional, the threat of a lawsuit will neither benefit the victim nor effect any real change. Takes something more sustained and substantial than that.
In my friend's case, she was at the director level of a large publicly-traded company. Particularly as you approach the top of the that kind of corporate hierarchy, the world becomes very small, and good-old-boy dynamics start to dominate. There's no formal blacklist, of course -- just the opportunity to meet your frenemy from her previous employer down at the bar, where he can confidentially warn you to "watch out for that one: she's a troublemaker". Nothing more needs to be said, and certainly nothing needs to be written.
I suspect that hiring decisions at lower levels will be both more process-driven and better-documented, so it might be more possible to prove the existence of blacklists there (even if it's still far from easy). But near the top of the pyramid, I have great trouble seeing how the punitive legal action can realistically be used to break up the good-old-boy network.
Seeing this play out has actually changed my mind on the necessity of having gender quotas for management and boards. Previously I'd been opposed on vaguely libertarian grounds; now I see it as the only practical way of disrupting the good-old-boy networks that genuinely do a lot of harm. (Society is genuinely damaged -- depriving itself of so much talent -- by systematic bias against women).
Of course, it does happen, in various ways. The way to find out is to find a sympathetic recruiter (or, a "recruiter" who's really your friend), and have them call for a reference for you. There's good fodder for a lawsuit here.
This is hitting all the major news outlets, the CEO and the board are already promising "urgent" investigative action. And, oh yeah, a company valued at multi-billions is about to be hit with publicity which they will pay dearly for as #deleteuber starts trending again, at a time when angry people are sick of reading about the latest Trump zinger.
In the best case scenario a lawyer would have gotten her a modest pay out in exchange for shutting up, far more likely however would be a disappointing outcome and blacklisting.
Saying "sue" is easy if you're not the one that has to deal with the fallout from it. Several months if not years dragged through the courts, having to relive the experience. Being blacklisted from the industry and unable to find a job. Constant harassment from frog trolls who seem to pop up every time a woman tries to assert that she's a human being.
There's no legal minimum but it's more difficult to form a class with a handful of people.
Without fail, every HR department has been the one department where you will find the majority of staff are women.
I don't know if this is the same everywhere else in the world, but it strikes me as particularly insidious in this Uber case where, in an obviously apparent misogynistic culture, a female employee is having to report these issues to a female HR rep who in turn is being forced to toe whatever dubious, unwritten company line Uber works under.
I mean this passage here...
" She then asked me if women engineers at Uber were friends and talked a lot, and then asked me how often we communicated, what we talked about, what email addresses we used to communicate, which chat rooms we frequented, etc."
...made my skin crawl.
I just think HR in general is an extremely subversive environment.
Also, having the number of woman engineers drop from 25% to less than 3% on that team should have been a red flag well in advance of this ever being published.
This case sounds like either completely inexperienced and untrained HRBPs OR they're being overinfluenced/overrun by management. Possibly both.
Is there an HR major? Or is it MBA student who never graduate? How does one end up picking a good HR person vs just a friend-of-a-friend? Programmers go to an interviews and they get slammed with whiteboard silly algorithm questions. What kind of question do HR people have to answer to pass the test?
It seems here protecting the company would have been firing the person proposing sex on the spot. Blog author even had the chat logs as evidence from what I understand!
Now the answer is probably they had defended and covered up that manager's behavior before. Blog alludes to that. So it became a pattern. Then just when another similar complaint popped up, admitting it was wrong and doing anything besides what they did before, would have meant acknowledging how wrong they have been in the past. "But we've already covered up for him 10 times, why is this special now..." kind of deal.
That analysis lets management offer HR as a scapegoat too easily, IMO. Why was HR willing to defend and cover up that managers behavior the first time? "If you make things difficult for me, things will end up difficult for you", and you end up promoting sycophants and pushing out anyone with a spine.
In other words, HR doesn't create corporate culture. Management does. And the culture they wound up with both convinces managers that they can get away with this BS, and HR to cover it up.
Your manager is engaging in harassment, HR is where you "should" raise this. Her following protocol also makes her case stronger I would argue. You gave your company the chance to make things right. After that I'd say the gloves could come off if that's the route you want to go.
That assumes your union rep is inclined to help you. In practice (not principle), they have the same incentives as the other managers and HR do in this story. The union rep could decide that the harasser is more important to their union, politically, than you are, and decide not to take action.
Plus, the union can simply terminate your membership as retaliation. For a closed shop, that's equivalent to firing you, but without many of the legal protections that come against wrongful termination.
That's not a matter that's specific to a particular country, though. It's inherent in the nature of a union structure (and arguably inherent in the nature of any hierarchical human structure, which is a superset of "unions").
You can find situations like the one I described in any country, not just the US.
Contact your state's labour commissioner. If you received stock or stock options, contact your state securities commissioner. Otherwise, suing is tried and true.
I wasn't aware that spez was co-CEO with ekjp... I thought he only became CEO afterwards. Even if the board/spez forced her to make all of the unpopular decisions (there were many), the buck still stopped with her as the CEO[1], fall-woman or not. Also, why did spez want Victoria gone? He made Ellen Pao fire her too, right?
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_ap...
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3d2hv3/kn0t...
Note, I'm not affiliated with Pao, I just thought her treatment by the reddit community was extremely disappointing.
I understand that English has absorbed that word and its meaning in the current sense. But please don't use that word. That is like the n-word in south india. It is specifically used to refer to people in a derogatory way.
PS : putting this here for those who may be misinformed
That doesn't mean they can't be terrible at their jobs, or fail to understand what the true purpose of their job is. But that's a potentiality that's not limited to HR.
*Not a lawyer, but this is what I was told at my employer's harassment and legal training, which all employees are obligated to attend.
That said, lots of companies have HR departments that are terrible, so it all depends on whether you think yours is trustworthy and competent or not.
Also about finance/payroll and others.
At risk of labouring your point; which also certainly isn't true in a legal (and thus actual) sense.
This gets posted from time to time, but if you work for a company, you really owe it to yourself to read Corporate Confidential.
https://www.amazon.com/Corporate-Confidential-Secrets-Compan...
If they were actually trying to help the company, they would have taken action to reduce its liability. Instead, they played politics.
In many companies, the apparent job of HR is to allow the HR director to act like a little Napoleon, even if it harms the company substantially.
If they ask you to sign something it is usually not in your interest to do what they ask.
HR does protect the company, but it also helps employees tremendously. I've had several beneficial experiences with Human Resources folks. One company setting a bad example is no reason to dump on an entire profession.