On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that 15 former Washington Redskins workers had been sexually harassed while running for the organization.
Team workers whose alleged moves were detailed in the article, including radio host Larry Michael and professional staff manager Alex Santos, left the club without delay. Michael retired and Santos was fired. Washington and its owner, Dan Snyder, have hired D.C. attorney Beth Wilkinson “to conduct a thorough and independent review of this case and help the team set new criteria for workers in the future,” the team said in a report to the Post.
Tom Miller is the CEO of ClearForce, a company that specializes in discovering bad practices and high-risk behaviors. He said that with regard to scandals and crises like the one facing Washington lately, some questions want to be asked and answered immediately.
What efforts have been made to proactively find problems? Who knows? Who said when? Was the data successful in the correct user in a timely manner? Have you referred to a control user who intends to query this data and that user is in a position to take preventive measures? Is there a record of all this?
“These are the demanding situations that organizations constantly face,” Miller said. “And unfortunately, most of them deal with it on an ad hoc basis, which suddenly creates those media crises because something serious happens and they don’t have a smart answer or a smart track record about how it all happened.”
Organizations like Washington, which announced Monday that they would take away their much-criticized nickname from the Redskins, deserve to take credit for the generation that helped solve crises like this. And if you’re more proactive than reactive, Miller said, get in a situation where things become a struggle to answer media questions.
What Washington hasn’t done is say “here’s the technology, here’s the politics, and here are the systems in position where we proactively seek those disruptions among our workforce,” Miller said, “to make sure as soon as we realize something like this, it promptly targets a user in a leadership position within our human resources organization in the right degrees of management in the right degrees of management , within the legal department, the general counsel, anywhere, who has the duty and authority to take appropriate action and we can do so at the right time. »
Has Washington captured this internal dicy habit very well, or do we want an explosive article to denounce this atrocious habit? Miller continued with some other questions that the team and organization have or have asked.
“Are we able to correctly capture internal threat behaviors? What is the systemic mechanism for capturing them? If the answer is RR. Hh. or a supervisor, will they report less because they’re afraid of ramifications? Are measures taken to protect against prejudice? , sponsorship and targeting to ensure that disorders are treated and that complaints are made without fear of reprisals? Is there a way to anonymously report suspicious, misplaced or illegal behavior? If the answer is that we have a whistleblower at 1-800, do other people use it? Do workers literally think it’s anonymous? »
“If organizations don’t rush to ask those tough questions,” Miller said, “they’re vulnerable to the kind of disruptions we’re seeing here with Washington.
“We all tolerated it because we knew that if we complained, and they reminded us, there were another 1,000 people who would settle for our paintings in the blink of an eye,” said Emily Applegate, the team’s former marketing manager. Many of the other people cited in the story have blamed Snyder for “a human resources department with little staff,” a full-time painter for more than 220 full-time painters.
Snyder issued on a Friday that he gave the impression that he was unaware of the situation.
“It’s problematic even though Snyder wasn’t aware of what happened,” Miller said.
Without knowing the main points of this research, “many times, when leaders distance the property,” he said, “it’s the challenge of not having the right information. Leadership distances when it doesn’t have the answers to the questions that have been asked and can be solved.”
Now, said Miller, Snyder, and Washington have the opportunity to make competitive changes, where they identify gaps in answers to past questions that have been presented and begin to fill them.
“Immediately start putting the answers in position so that it possibly exists today,” Miller said, “that they can collect data and pass it on to the other people who are right to resolve those disorders in a more proactive and preventive way.” “
Shlomo Sprung is senior editor of Forbes SportsMoney. He is editor of feature films in Awful Announcing and writes in FanSided, SI Knicks, YES Network and
Shlomo Sprung is senior editor of Forbes SportsMoney. He is also a feature film editor for Awful Announcing and writes for FanSided, SI Knicks, YES Network and other publications. He graduated in 2011 from Columbia University’s School of Journalism and previously worked for the New York Knicks, Business Insider, Sporting News and Major League Baseball. You stick to him on Twitter.