Sexual Harassment Roundup: Gregg Wallace, a Recent Tribunal, and Tackling the ‘Everyone Knows’ Predators in the Workplace

Preventing sexual harassment has been a central focus of Byrne Dean's recent work.

As regulatory, media, and societal scrutiny continues to grow, UK employers are also coming to terms with their now-enforceable legal duty to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace.

We’ve reflected on some of the most prominent stories surrounding sexual harassment and what they mean for employers, including:

- The Gregg Wallace case: What lessons can employers take from how allegations are managed?

- A recent high-profile tribunal: What does this case, involving sexual harassment allegations at a prominent law firm, teach us about conducting investigations?

- From Harrods to Sean ‘P Diddy’ Combs: How can HR address the protection of powerful predators within a culture of silence, even when “everyone knows” about the behaviour?

Read our full roundup below for insights and practical takeaways:

Gregg Wallace allegations: 6 lessons we can learn from the Masterchef host

Founder Matt Dean explored six lessons for employers managing allegations of sexual harassment:

1. Act promptly: take allegations seriously from the start

When a leader learns they have an employee who may have acted inappropriately, they have to take it seriously. Take action.

2. The importance of person-centred and trauma-informed investigations

Investigators must be properly trained and emotionally intelligent. The trauma of sexual abuse can affect recollection of events.

3. Deciding credibility in ‘he said, she said’ cases

Where there’s no corroborating evidence, investigators need to decide who’s more credible. A lack of evidence, or having no formal complaint, can no longer be used as an excuse for inaction. (if it ever could!)

4. Concrete steps to prevent repetition

If the employer decides the transgressor needs to continue working as they have been, behavioural work with them and perhaps a minder/coach system would be good suggestions.

5. Foster a community of accountability

Avoiding harassment is about building a culture where everyone knows they have a responsibility.

6. Transgressors need to be open and accountable

Transgressors need to drop the defensiveness. This is difficult, because they feel like they’re under attack. Remember – this is about understanding that other people are different; that your behaviour may be landing with them in a way you hadn’t anticipated.

You can read Matt’s full piece here, with more detail on all six points.

Rustambekov v Fieldfisher tribunal: What leaders must learn about sexual harassment

The summary reports of the recent tribunal judgement in Rustambekov v Fieldfisher LLP have  been that a male senior associate was unfairly dismissed, after being falsely accused of sexual assault by a female colleague.

As ever, there’s more to it than that. The case raises important issues that will be current for some years – particularly as the new legal duty to take all reasonable steps to eradicate sexual harassment beds down.

Here are three takeaways for leaders from this case, from Founder Matt Dean:

1. Be more mindful of your impact and avoid misinterpretable situations.

To be clear, I would not categorise something like sharing a lift with a woman as easily misinterpretable.

Someone with a reputation as “ladies man” following drunk female colleagues to the toilets at a social event, however, is. As did the claimant in this case.

It will, of course, help greatly if your reputation is as someone who is thoughtful and treats colleagues respectfully.

2. Investigating sexual misconduct is a skilled and difficult job. Treat it as one.

When facing an allegation of sexual assault, employers must ensure they have an experienced, emotionally intelligent, and process-adept professional who has sufficient time to investigate properly. The more egregious the allegations, the more thorough the investigation must be.

The employer here made basic errors in its investigation and disciplinary process. As a starting point, the complainant, the subject, and all relevant witnesses need to be properly and fully interviewed by someone they trust as independent. And the person being disciplined needs to know (and be allowed to comment on) the evidence on which a decision is made.

In a ‘he says, she says’ situation like this, an investigator broadly has one key task. Only two people actually know what happened, and the investigator either needs to be clear which party’s version of events they find more credible (and why), or they have to provide whoever’s making that decision with all the background evidence they need to make it. That didn’t happen here.

3. Leaders should think about evidence they may have to give in a tribunal

Many of our investigations involve alcohol-fuelled events, but alcohol itself however seldom feels like the driver.

The driver is the culture that’s been allowed to develop throughout the year. Reading this judgement, this feels no different.

When you are there - a senior person at an event - you absolutely have to think about what’s going on around you.

Something that’s always been impactful in our training is asking leaders to think about how comfortable they’ll feel giving evidence to a fact-finding tribunal (like a SRA disciplinary or an employment tribunal).

Two evidential snapshots (given by a senior partner of the employer to this tribunal) illustrate the point.

Para 41: ‘I saw he had his arm around Colleague 2 and was almost lying against her, sort of in a hug with her. It was fairly obvious that Colleague 2 felt very uncomfortable with this.’

Para 43: ‘I had noticed a couple of things that did not seem right for example, I noticed Colleague 2 and Colleague 1 walking in the direction of the toilet and [the claimant] following in that direction shortly after.’

I’m sure many senior people will see behaviour that ‘doesn’t seem right’, and will take no action. Particularly now, with the new duty, doing nothing when sexual harassment may be happening isn’t an option.

Every senior leader should regularly visualise what evidence they might have to give, and ask themself whether the culture they're presiding over requires change.

This article appears in full on People Management.

What strategic action should HR take when there’s a well-established predator in their organisation, where their behaviour has been tolerated for a long time?

From Harrods to Sean ‘P Diddy’ Combs, sometimes powerful predators are protected by a culture of silence, even though “everyone knew”.

Our Head of Strategy, Samantha Mangwana, shares what HRs can do when they think this might be happening in their workplace:

The simple message is don’t ignore it, no matter how senior the person is. You have to take the view that if you don’t do this, no-one else will.

In a situation where "everybody knows about it"; your job, ultimately, is to help the organisation form a view whether the conduct has happened or not on the balance of probabilities.

Basically, is it more likely than not that the predatory behaviour has been happening?

The first question is the most difficult and important - certainly where the predator is an owner - Who can you talk to in the organisation about the steps you need to take?

Understand your organisation’s governance: obvious suspects would be the General Counsel, perhaps any Non-Executive Directors with a people brief. Sharing and agreeing your plans with this group and agreeing confidentiality is an important first step and will allow you to move forward.

In terms of taking action, the first area to focus on is barriers to reporting; how can you change the systems to make it easier for people to speak up? When it happens, you need to know about it and it needs to be recorded. Implement effective, accessible channels. Platforms such as InChorus can help larger employers here, where employees can anonymously log incidents and flag these to management discreetly, providing objective data to support conversations with leadership.

You can’t insist people go on the record retrospectively to complain about the predator, but there’s nothing stopping you from looking at data you already hold, and sitting down with people who have talked in the past to HR, or have been mentioned as being potentially people with knowledge. Reaching out to ex-colleagues (and other non-employee) witnesses can also be useful.

At this stage consider bringing in a third party to conduct any investigation of this type (providing their findings confidentially to your group). This can greatly increase the likelihood of people speaking up. Choose an organisation that prioritises emotional intelligence with its investigators, and adopts person-centred and trauma-informed approaches. Be comfortable with the idea that you may need to adapt your organisation’s rigid processes in order to generate greater confidence in reporting.

Rather than producing a detailed report in the first instance, whoever conducts this investigation can report to your group verbally; together you can agree how to proceed from this point. The question will be whether to progress to a disciplinary process with the predator. You must make sure of procedural fairness. (i.e, Any employee facing disciplinary action should have the opportunity to know enough about the case against them to be able to put forward their explanation or defence in response.).

The question of communications (both internal and external) will be massively important. Having set up the right group at the outset will benefit you greatly at this point.

And finally, how to take meaningful, long-term action to prevent sexual harassment happening in your workplace

Making meaningful change requires addressing the six areas below, on a continuous and evolving basis.

We are helping organisations at varying levels of preparedness, and we can help you too.

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