“I experienced something very inappropriate from a senior industry figure,” says Lisa Bell who had been working at the time as HR director of a tech publishing and events business. “I spoke to my CEO, who dealt with it impeccably. And I was thinking, ‘Gosh, I didn’t even think about that as sexual harassment, because it was closed down so quickly. But not everybody would have been as fortunate as me.’”
It was at the height of the #MeToo movement, with Bell remembering conversations with those with similar experiences who hadn’t been treated with the same care – and having just given birth – that she decided it was time to be a force for positive change. She launched Tell Jane, a UK-based HR and ED&I (aka DEI) consultancy with a focus in tackling harassment and discrimination.
But initial conversations with colleagues and contacts uncovered some of the pernicious attitudes that still keep workplaces – and industries – stuck in toxicity.
“I was very naive. I thought, ‘Everybody’s going to do this and work in the preventative space and stop this stuff from happening,’. And it became quite apparent to me that whilst everyone was willing to talk about it, they weren’t really willing to take action and prevent it.”
Clients began to engage with Tell Jane services, usually after some harassment incident had been exposed. Training and education to prevent harassment just wasn’t a thing people thought they needed, despite the very real potential harm – emotional, professional, reputational, and physical – they were exposing employees to.
An early case Tell Jane was asked to assess had a sexual harassment incident as its main focus, but it was quickly obvious that the harassment didn’t happen in isolation. Alongside were bullying behaviors, racism, and disability discrimination. It was then that Tell Jane decided to expand its remit to encompass all unwanted behaviors in the workplace, looking at issues holistically, rather than playing whack-a-mole with individual symptoms.
Bringing HR safety to a risk-filled freelance world
Tell Jane clients include companies in the creative industries, tech start-ups, and the charity sector. Bell explains that creative businesses have their own particular vulnerabilities when it comes to problems of harassment and inappropriate behavior.
“The average person doesn’t have an HR background, particularly in the creative industries. And people are really passionate about their work and build friendships through work. There’s a huge freelance population as well, which creates another vulnerability in terms of power dynamics. And the boundaries between professional and personal become more blurred in the creative sectors than they do in other sectors.”
Whether its film, TV, music, theater, crews will frequently spend multiple days – or weeks or months – working together, traveling together, building friendships and bonds.
“People don’t understand that it’s still work because the lines are so blurred,” says Bell. “Creating a real understanding around where the lines are and what’s appropriate is key to preventing these behaviors. It’s not just getting the management response right but also providing education around what’s acceptable, what’s not acceptable.”
The precarity of freelance life can put excessive power into the hands of employers. Freelancers may be so eager to please, in order to secure future work, that they turn a blind eye to inappropriate activity, or stay silent about abuse they have experienced themselves.
Dealing with complexity
Tell Jane’s work is now roughly even split between reactive work addressing problematic incidents and prevention activity.
“We’ve now got lots of clients that work more in the preventative space. Or they have had an incident, but now solely focus on the preventative. I think that’s a sign of change.”
The Tell Jane team has 17 full time staff, operating out of the UK. The company’s incident response services focus on investigations of workplace discrimination, sexual harassment, and bullying.
“We’re really good at the messy stuff,” says Bell. “Or maybe the situation’s not that complicated but it has high PR risk around it or is sensitive in nature.”
Workplace personalities and power structures make for constellations of complexity that require outside assistance. Powerful people might involved in an incident, and a consultancy like Tell Jane offers a viewpoint that can remain immune to internal pressures or intimidation. Cases of multiple complainants or multiple respondents also require special handling, since each individual testimony has to be equally respected and analyzed for what it reveals about the bigger picture.
“Sometimes it’s really gray – you’ve got a situation where it’s one person’s word against another. Clients will ring us and they don’t know who to believe, so we do the fact-finding and develop an independent investigation report.”
Tell Jane client companies can also subscribe to an anonymous reporting service. Workers within the company, or even freelancers employed, can contact Tell Jane if they have experienced unwanted behavior, and Tell Jane feeds back to the company in a way that will protect the reporter of the incident.
From reaction to prevention
The second arm of the business, focusing on prevention, is the long tail of creating safer working environments. Unfortunately, prevention training may not be initiated until after the business has had an incident.
“Clients often get the first response wrong,” explains Bell. “They might say things like ‘That’s just the way they are’ or ‘They’re married with kids – are you sure you want to raise a complaint?’ or ‘This could ruin your career’. So we train clients to get really clued up on how to actually get a good response in place.”
In any emergency, most of us fall back on our training, and most of the “training” we receive in life is the stuff we’ve passively absorbed from the environments we’ve lived and worked in. Faced with an adrenalized situation, regardless of our best intentions, we’ll grab the tools that feel most comfortable – and those aren’t always the most effective ones. Practicing new responses needs to be built into workplace education as much as practicing the walk to your fire assembly point.
Tell Jane helps teams understand what incidents are relatively minor and which need proper investigation and formal action. Building a working vocabulary is important too and training people in the principle of being an “active bystander” where someone witnessing harassment can intercept potential harm before it escalates.
“Serious cases with assault, maybe even criminal cases, don’t just happen out the blue. If you can tackle the small stuff, you’ll find that you won’t get a serious case, because the lines and boundaries have already been drawn.“
Employers must understand their duty of care in preventing and actively managing unwanted behavior. Again, the freelance nature of the industry can mean that responsibility falls through the cracks. Training of the leadership team not only helps set the boundaries and expectations for the whole enterprise, but gives leaders the confidence to be proactive about enforcing them.
“If they were working in a corporate setting, they would be going through management training, development, and there would be investment. I do see a lot of indies are more focused on investing in this now. I’ve seen a shift in terms of them being more proactive and investing not just in their HQ people, but in that freelance population too.”
Beyond the business
There are also Third Party incidents to deal with – those interactions that occur with customers or suppliers, or outside of the workplace but still involving work. If you suspect something is happening under some other business’s roof, how far does your responsibility to act go? Do you walk up and directly challenge a CEO your company is trying to close a deal with? How involved should your team be in activity that is outside the parameters of the workplace? And how can outside behavior impact the team?
“We always build thrid party scenarios into the training. The employment law is evolving still around this in the UK, with the Employment Rights Bill, and there’s going to be a duty on that imminently. It’s still not okay, even if it’s not colleague to colleague, it’s still someone you’re coming into contact with through work. So how do you deal with those scenarios? You might deal with them a little bit more strategically, but they still need dealing with.
“These conversations are never far away and there is always going to be an incident that drives the preventative work. I wish it was all focused on the preventaive work, and there is a lot more of that, but it’s often driven from a client having an issue.
The Tell Jane website hosts multiple resources that are free to access, including guides and risk assessment templates, and hosts free webinars and clinics regularly.