If You Need Another Reason to Do Stay Interviews, #MeToo Is It

I can tell you scores of reasons why Stay Interviews are right for you and your company, long before crossing the waters toward the #MeToo movement which is loaded with controversy. But let’s muscle directly toward that controversy.

All employees, not just women, need their forum to announce abuse. Abuse comes in many forms with sexual abuse being just one example. Bullying fits in this category as does any action which pits someone with power against another.

I’ve worked in organizations and know first-hand that such abuse sometimes happens at the supervisor level…but sometimes at higher levels, too. The result is employees like their jobs, want to keep their jobs, but learn through very bad circumstances they must accede to weird, uncomfortable demands to keep their jobs. Those demands at the extreme are about sexual activities, but sometimes are just about taking undeserved abuse from someone whose power exceeds theirs.

Of course, peers and non-manager employees sometimes try to take advantage of their working colleagues, too, by leveraging various forms of authority or just employing a strong personality to coerce or intimidate.

The stories we see in the media are not only about sexual abuse but also about the abuse of power. One example is a woman is sexually approached…and wanting to keep her job, looks for the best way to minimally accommodate and duck. A non-informed outsider would say, “Why didn’t she just say no?” The answer is she had bills to pay, likes her day-to-day job otherwise, and is seeking ways to survive.

Stay Interviews, then, open the door to communication. Some supervisors are in the dark regarding managers above them who are making sexual-favor-innuendoes to members of their teams…or about others doing the same from any corner of their companies. Or those supervisors might be the actual perpetrators and need to be directly confronted.

Further, some supervisors are in the dark about their own behaviors, mistakenly thinking that a comment that seems natural to them is offensive to others. Imagine this scenario where a supervisor asks an employee, “When was the last time you thought about leaving? What prompted it?”, and the employee says, “You are the reason. It’s OK if you tell me I look nice, but it’s not OK if you tell me I look nice in a tight sweater”.

These are the conversations that need to happen. Employees must be invited to confront sexual abuse…and for that matter any type of abuse. And even more so if that abuse is happening at a higher place.

So there are two key lessons here: the first is that all abuse of any type must be reported and addressed…and the second is less obvious and just as important, that sometimes leaders on any level don’t understand how their actions could be misconstrued and hurtful and that a compliment is more than a compliment…and someone needs to tell them.

There is no perfect fix for increasing communications to overcome abuse. Stay Interviews, though, open another door of communication, and one that is not tied to performance or a review. Requiring your managers to introduce them provides each organization with a better, more informed way to open up conversations with their employees and brings abuse of any kind into the open. Once that occurs it opens the doors to get HR involved to stop it.

Schedule a free one-on-one strategy session with our team and we will listen to your concerns, probe deeply to learn more about your workplace needs and work together to find solutions to cut turnover and improve employee engagement. https://go.oncehub.com/TeamFinnegan