As boards grapple with the challenges of shaping the modern workplace, they can often stumble over certain myths that undermine efforts to create a safe and thriving environment for employees. In a thought-provoking chat, Jodi Butts (Partner, Watson Board Advisors) and Janice Rubin (Partner, Rubin-Thomlinson LLP) delve into some of the most entrenched misconceptions that Janice has seen over her career as an employment lawyer and workplace investigator.

Jodi Butts: To warm up, before we dive into these workplace culture myths, I want to ask: what is the workplace and where is the workplace?

Janice Rubin: Well, that’s an interesting question. The workplace is the place people go to work, but where that is is becoming increasingly complex. Where people go to work can be a corporate office, but I’m at home right now, and I’m at work, so this little office is also my workplace. The legal trend in the last 20-25 years is to see the workplace as more expansive than just within the four walls of a brick-and-mortar structure, so boards need to think expansively about where work starts and ends.

JB: So tell me a bit about your process when you were thinking of the top five workplace myths – how did you go about landing on these five?

JR: I thought, “If I had 300 board members sitting in front of me, what would I like to tell them to make their job easier and to illuminate workplace issues that are not always well understood?” I considered the lessons I’ve learned over the years from conducting workplace investigations, from being an employment lawyer – and it was good that I was limited to five because, truth be told, I had more than five! And I’ll admit, Jodi, I cheated. I have six, but one is compounded, so your readers will have to guess which one is the bonus.

JB: I love that there’s a bonus! Okay, last question before we go through them: How does it show up in the boardroom and in the workplace when you’re under some of these mistaken beliefs?

JR: I think it shows up in a few ways. One is that as an organization, you might be under-responding to or underestimating the problem in your workplace, and not sufficiently marshalling resources to deal with the issue. Or you could just be responding completely wrongly. All of which will lead you down a problematic path. If they’re committed to creating a healthy, safe workplace, boards and workplace leaders have to get beyond these limiting beliefs. These issues – harassment, discrimination, incivility, disrespect – plague most workplaces, if not all of them, and they manifest in ways that aren’t immediately recognizable. I think it’s incumbent on board members to have a heightened understanding of these issues in order to get their workplaces to the desired place.

JB: Okay, without further ado, what is the first myth you would like to share with us?

“If I’m not hearing about it, it doesn’t exist in my organization.”

JR: There’s a reason this is number one; I have heard this countless times from board members. “Everything is fine in our organization because we didn’t have any complaints last year” or “Everything is fine because the engagement surveys tell us everybody is really happy” or “Nobody has said anything bad in an exit interview.” What board members and leaders of workplaces fail to understand is that there are so many disincentives for people to come forward and make complaints or raise issues.

Complaints are really only going to account for a fraction of what is happening in the workplace. And most bad behaviour – even really, really, really bad behaviour – goes unreported. People are afraid that they’re going to be subject to a reprisal. They’re concerned about rocking the boat. They’re concerned about not being believed. They might not even know how to make a complaint.

I think there is a tendency for some organizations to blame individuals for not coming forward, but it is, in many respects, a miracle that there are actually any formal complaints because there are just too many disincentives for coming forward – and those are real. They are not imagined.

On this issue, and probably many others, leaders need to operate with a huge amount of humility. Things go undetected and unreported, and it can be that way for years and years, and then for whatever reason they bubble up, and then you can have well-meaning leaders who are surprised.

But the source of these problems is the culture. These are attributes of our culture that manifest in the workplace – it’s not really surprising – and the thought that silence means everything is okay is a fundamental problem.

JB: So should boards be asking the CEO and other leaders in the organization what they’re doing to encourage complaints? How do they get underneath this?

JR:  Yeah. You know certainly in the course of my lifetime as a lawyer – a generation now – our mechanisms to deal with this have improved and definitely become more sophisticated. When I first started to practice, it wasn’t mandatory to have a policy on workplace respect or a human rights policy. Now in most provinces in Canada, a policy that deals with harassment and discrimination is  mandatory. Most organizations now do training. Most organizations now have a complaint mechanism – or mechanisms plural. But the problem is that the complaint mechanisms are reactive and dependent upon employees operating them. I call them “clean up on aisle 7.” There’s a problem – please fix it. I think that puts too much onus on your employees to tell you about problems in your organization.

I think organizations need to be flipping the paradigm and looking at ways to gather the information themselves in other ways. Things like engagement surveys, pulse surveys, cultural assessments, enhanced exit interviews, leadership 360s – ways of gathering information about the experience of people within the organization outside of the complaints mechanism.

JB: Another example could be to look at where there are high turnover rates within an organization. Not just looking at the global number, which definitely tells you something but it’s not going to help you zero in on the problem.

JR: That’s exactly right. You know, I think sometimes when information does bubble up to organizational leaders, there can be a tendency to diminish it. “Oh it’s just one remark” or “it’s not that serious” or “it’s not part of a pattern.” They don’t understand how truly awful this behaviour is and how impactful it can be on workplace culture. It can ultimately affect the operation of an organization if it gets really bad.

I do think there’s been progress on this – it just needs to show up as a priority. The experience your employees are having at work needs to be important. It really has to be incorporated into everything that you do.

JB: Okay, so that was a doozy.

JR: That was number one!

JB: So what is Myth #2?

“Sexual harassment is a thing of the past.”

JR: When I speak to organizational leaders, including board members, there’s often a feeling that this is just nostalgic. “Oh, you remember back in the day when that was a problem?” We haven’t solved this problem. There’s a recent Statistics Canada report that says 47% of women and 31% of men report experiencing harassment or sexual assault in the workplace. We have not solved this problem.

JB: Wow. So, embracing this reality, what should a board do in terms of thinking specifically about sexual harassment?

JR: Well, embrace the reality and don’t be afraid to face it when an issue emerges.

JB: Right.

JR: Do not be tolerant of individuals who are engaging in this behaviour, even if it’s viewed as being on the lower end of the spectrum of seriousness. And don’t be surprised. Say there’s a complaint made against the CEO alleging he’s engaged in sexual harassment. The board should not be flabbergasted. “Oh, you know Jimmy, he’s such a great guy! How could that possibly be?” Well, what you know about Jimmy may be limited, and he may be a great guy to you, but he may also be doing some stuff that is not so great. Boards need to maintain an openness to the fact that this is still a phenomenon in our workplaces.

JB: That’s good advice. Okay what about Myth #3?

“Having an up-to-date policy is all we have to do to create a healthy workplace.”

JB: And it begins and ends with a policy.

JR: That’s it. In many jurisdictions, not only are organizations required to have a policy but they’re required to update them periodically. I’m not against policies – they’re good things – but I think there is a limiting belief that once you’ve done it, particularly if it’s been an onerous process to get there, you’re done.

You need to understand how the policy is impacting the workplace. Who’s using it? How are you disseminating it? A policy is a great thing to have, but they have to be disseminated in a meaningful way and there has to be real discussion about what it means and how it impacts people – especially if you’re asking people to change their behaviour.

JB: And it needs to be supported with the right skills and systems to make it come to life. Is it important to bring that policy to the board for approval, or not?

JR: That’s an interesting question. I think it’s worth the board knowing about the policy because the board members need to be governed by the policy too. We’ve done investigations where the respondent is a board member who is not behaving properly, so I think it’s worthwhile for board members to understand what the policy is as it pertains to their own behaviour and the behaviour of the senior leaders in the organization. Whether the policy should go to the board for approval or not, I’m more ambivalent about, but they need to understand the policy and be able to model their behaviour according to the policy.

JB: So the policy will come to the board in a variety of contexts – sometimes it’s there for information, sometimes it’s there because the way governance is structured at a particular organization, it requires their approval, and sometimes it’s there to communicate that it applies to them – but I’m not sure if the folks putting it in front of the board always clearly articulate why it’s there. In general, I think there’s a lack of clarity around why a policy would go in front of a board – it might not actually be in front of them to approve, but because they need to know it applies to them.

JB: Okay so what is Myth #4?

“He said/she said cases can’t be determined.”

JB: Interesting. Okay, I’m very intrigued by this one!

JR: If I had a penny for every time I hear this one…! “He said/she said” is a bit of a misnomer, but I use this language because it is often how sexual harassment or sexual assault cases are described. The myth is that if you don’t have corroborative evidence to support what a (typically, female) complainant  says, it’s impossible to get to determine what actually happened. .

The reality is there usually isn’t direct corroborative evidence; these incidents typically happen in private. So the mistaken belief is that you can just never resolve these cases. And, of course, that’s not the legal standard. The legal standard is that it’s nice to have corroborative evidence if you can find it – maybe there’s a confidant  witness or maybe other evidence that tends to support one party’s version of events  – but in the end, you know that you will have to make a credibility assessment. And that’s exactly what boards should be doing because otherwise, they’re abdicating their responsibility in dealing with a really serious workplace issue.

It seems to me that organizations really don’t want to deal with these kinds of complaints. It’s so yucky and uncomfortable, that this is an unconscious escape route.

JB: It might also be because people are thinking that there’s some sort of criminal standard that applies.

JR: Yeah, I think that is an extension of this myth. In the workplace, as contrasted to criminal law, the standard of proof is the balance of probabilities: what’s more probable or not to have occurred?

JB: Okay, Myth #5?

“Top performers can’t (or don’t) engage in unsavoury behaviour.”

JR: In our workplaces and in other contexts like the world of sports, there is still a certain lack of perception in terms of our stars. That star wattage affects the entirety of how they’re judged, and it can cause people to ignore or dismiss bad behaviour. Or if it doesn’t lead them to ignore it, it certainly creates a deeply held reluctance to take a close look at that bad behaviour and hold these people accountable.

I’ve seen examples of leaders who have been the subject of investigations that my colleagues or I have done, and these leaders have been excellent at managing the board; they’re great at telling the board what they think it wants to hear. Board members think this person is fantastic – funny, charming, wonderful – but then the story about how this person interacts with their peers or subordinates emerges and it’s like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

When organizations are faced with allegations involving their star  people, my experience is that they often just don’t want to go there, don’t want to look at it, because it feels like it’s going to unravel the whole fabric of the organization. But the funny thing is, it doesn’t. No one is indispensable.

 

Obstacles to understanding what’s really going on in the workplace

JB: I’m sure you’ve encountered other myths about the workplace; we’ve asked you to choose what you think of as the most pervasive – are these also the most dangerous?

JR: Well, when you add danger to the question, it’s a slightly different lens. For example, the overuse of Non-Disclosure Agreements. Now, sometimes the board is involved directly in this, and sometimes it’s not, or it’s only indirectly involved. They might know about it if they’re dealing with a complaint against a CEO and a settlement with an NDA attached, or the board might be told about  a settlement with a confidentiality provision R in a quarterly report.

The use of those agreements used to be no big deal – they were expected. But now it can potentially look really bad on an organization, or even be unlawful in some jurisdictions, to overuse NDAs. The danger is in the perception – what are you hiding?

The other danger is that it can prevent the board from connecting the dots. If you treat every investigation as an individual case and you wrap it in confidentiality, it could be that you’re not looking at a whole potential system of cultural failing or a pattern of behaviour.

JB: So these top five – what caused them to rise to the top for you?

JR: I’m a sample of one lawyer, but these come up a lot in my work, and not just mine but my colleagues’ too. I guess they stick in my craw when I talk to board members.

I think these are ways of thinking that most often lead to board members and workplace leaders missing or not addressing problems. They’re such obstacles to understanding what’s really going on in the workplace.

By smashing through common myths, we highlight the critical need for proactive engagement and a savvy grasp of workplace dynamics. Embracing the messy realities of workplace culture and fostering an environment where employees feel genuinely safe is non-negotiable. Boards play a crucial role in shaping an organizational culture that champions respect, safety, and inclusivity, and in ensuring that the policies and practices of the organization will catch and address problems in a timely manner.