As Joyce Thomas-Villaronga, president of the local United Auto Workers chapter, explained “I know what to do if somebody touches me and says something awful to me, but the subtle things are almost worse because you can’t control it.”2 Comments like this help us understand why targets of harassment typically engage in passive coping behaviors such as avoidance and support seeking rather than confrontation or reporting. Feelings of confusion and awkwardness abound. When employees experience ‘gray zone’ behavior, they often remain silent. Not all sex-based behavior constitutes illegal harassment it exists on a continuum from unconscious bias (e.g., a patient assuming a woman in a white lab coat is a nurse and not a doctor) to egregious and illegal behavior (e.g., sexual assault). The choice to voice is even more complicated when it comes to addressing questionable sex-based behavior that is nuanced, ambiguous, and open to interpretation. Many targets want to report but fear others will not believe them, loss of control once they make a formal report, retaliation, and exclusion. The EEOC task force concluded that workplace harassment is a persistent problem that often goes unreported for a variety of reasons. Workplace Harassment Often Goes Unreported This is critical because “effective harassment prevention efforts, and workplace culture in which harassment is not tolerated, must start with and involve the highest level of management of the company.”5 The GVV approach can build an organizational culture of candor that enables targets, bystanders, and leaders to take action to prevent, and/or respond effectively to, sex-based harassment. GVV provides a different language for conversations about sex-based behavior, one that aligns with values-based leadership. Consequently, the intention of GVV is to practice voicing in order to build this muscle.3 The need to encourage and enable voice with regard to preventing sex-based harassment is an implicit theme in the EEOC’s report, which stated that “roughly three out of four individuals who experienced harassment never even talked to a supervisor, manager, or union representative about the harassing conduct.”5 The report noted that bystanders to harassment are also reluctant to voice concerns and that leaders play a central role in preventing harassment by changing norms in ways that encourage a sense of accountability, community, and shared responsibility for ending harassment. We know that practice increases the likelihood of actually giving voice. The overall emphasis of GVV is on developing confidence and skill to give voice, to act on one’s values. In this article, we explain how the GVV approach3 dovetails with the EEOC task force’s conclusions and recommendations and how organizations can improve their responses to sex-based harassment with this approach.4 We believe implementing GVV is an effective way to address all of the EEOC recommendations, but will focus specifically on the impact for targets, the organization, and bystanders.
Recognizing value systems that underlie actions is a powerful lever for opening up conversations that typically do not occur in organizations with compliance-based mentalities. Giving Voice to Values (GVV) is a skills-based approach that empowers people to move from silence to voice it helps us see that one person may experience an interaction as friendly banter whereas another may experience it as disrespectful. There is a business case for addressing workplace harassment, Workplace harassment remains a persistent problem, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) established a task force in 2015 to study the issue of workplace harassment and concluded that: Recognizing the failure of legalistic approaches, the U.S. We have reached a tipping point that has led to more “honest discussions of what’s not OK at work, but also toward silence and exclusion, a quiet backlash.”2 Compliance-based solutions (e.g., zero tolerance policies and formal reporting channels) currently in use by most organizations are not able to prevent sex-based harassment or the backlash occurring when organizations step up their enforcement efforts. It includes behaviors that are not sexual in nature, such as referring to women as bitches.)
(Sex-based harassment is defined as “behavior that derogates, demeans, or humiliates an individual based on that individual’s sex.”1 We use the term sex-based rather than sexual harassment because it is more comprehensive. Sex-based harassment in the workplace is a longstanding issue that has recently shifted in importance (and controversy) due to high-profile cases and social movements such as #MeToo.
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