Hey Zach, thanks for the response. I know you are unlikely to be able to reply to this with anything meaningfully helpful, and this might be frustrating for you, but I just wanted to flag some things that from the outside seem at minimum incongruous.
I’ve typed this quickly and without visibility into all of the considerations and information you have, so apologies in advance if this is more uncharitable than you’d like. (emphasis in quotes added)
Those concerns were the focus of Riley’s writing, and they drove how our team engaged with and shared (or didn’t share) it. We have an obligation as an employer to treat such complaints confidentially, evaluate them seriously, and avoid retaliatory action against the person raising the concerns. These obligations exist in part to avoid creating a chilling effect where employees feel uncomfortable raising HR concerns for fear of negative consequences for themselves.
Sorry but presumably:
CEA’s obligation as an employer to evaluate complaints seriously also applies to Frances?
CEA’s obligations around confidentiality would also apply to the sharing of Frances’ experiences in the doc?
an employee raising concerns about something doesn’t shield them from all misconduct or harassment during the process of raising the concern?
What about the chilling effect of staff not feeling comfortable raising HR concerns, or even working in your organisation because empirically CEA don’t seem to take harassment / sexual harassment sufficiently seriously? Does the idea that multiple managers, HR, CEO, and COO of an organisation can allow a sexualised description of an employee’s rape (etc) to be spread in the organisation without their consent, disregard an offer from the community health team to step in, and take ~no actions for 9 months not seem like it might have some kind of a chilling effect (or more)? I recognise that it’s important for HR concerns to be evaluated seriously but it feels like this standard wasn’t applied in any meaningful way to Frances?
It is now clear the ways in which our approach was too limited, too focused on following a standard HR process, and insufficiently proactive in recognizing the harmful nature of the contents included with the complaints.
I hope you appreciate that it’s difficult to take this statement seriously; it really doesn’t seem like the issue here is that CEA was following a standard HR process, both during the 9 months, as well as after the complaint.
What standard HR processes include “designated walking paths” and “assigned meal times” as appropriate responses? Alternatively, it seems like CEA’s ‘standard HR process’ does not capture the fact that the kind of content circulated might very obviously be considered a separate HR issue? (I recognise you explicitly name some of these failings afterwards and I don’t want to discount that, I just separately don’t really think it’s very convincing that HR was ‘too focussed on following a standard process’ is a good excuse / representation of what happened, and wanted to call that out.[1]
CEA should have proactively initiated this investigation sooner, without requiring Frances to act first. Failing to do so placed an unfair burden on Frances to self-advocate during what was an already difficult time...
Fair enough! Sorry if I’m reading too much into what might just be ~boilerplate. But acknowledging just the start time of the investigation makes it sound like you agree that this investigation should have been done, and once Frances advocated for this you took this seriously[2] (perhaps bar some ‘communication issues’ that you acknowlege).
But if:
CEA’s own legal team decided this was harassment
you later acknowledge[3] that creating a culture that prevents/addresses sexual harassment included staffing changes such as removing Riley, etc;
Then why did CEA propose things like “designated walking paths” and “assigned meal times” the first time round, instead of just taking action at that stage? This doesn’t seem like it’s just an issue of “CEA wasn’t proactive about initiating this investigation”, but also one where it didn’t take the investigation or HR processes for Frances appropriately seriously! Also, this does not appear to just an issue of Riley, or of HR here. This document allegedly crossed multiple managers, as well as your, and the COO’s desk! Should readers be concluding that somehow none of the people involved considered taking further action? Or that they did take more actions and it didn’t go anywhere? Or something else?
To be more explicit, right now it doesn’t seem like there’s any public information I can draw on to rule out something like “CEA took actions that appear consistent with them being motivated more by protecting themselves from legal and reputational risk, rather than because they are primarily interested in the wellbeing of their employees”.[4]
Given the seriousness of the situation I hope you understand me holding you to the public standard rather than base this off any positive personal interactions I may have had with you and any other CEA staff!
I also recognize laying groundwork means we are far from the desired end state, and that we will need to work hard to improve instead of offering quick fix solutions.
Part of the issue here is that even the groundwork that has already been laid did not help in this case right? What’s the reason the EA community, or prospective employees, should trust that things are different this time around?
“In particular, we need to create a culture where there is more organizational ownership and proactivity to prevent and address sexual harassment. We’re laying the groundwork for some of those changes via new staffing (Riley no longer works at CEA, we have a new HR manager, and multiple additional hires are on the way).”
I received this in my DMs and am sharing anonymously on their behalf:
Zach says: “Failing to do so placed an unfair burden on Frances to self-advocate …”, but this seems to be obscuring the fact that she wouldn’t even have had a chance to self-advocate if it hadn’t been for some member of staff (presumably against CEA policy) sharing the existence of the doc with her. I wonder why this wasn’t addressed in the reflections.
Indeed, why is it that when someone did have concerns the thing they did was to partially disclose things to Frances rather than raise it within CEA? This does seem to suggest that people reading the document could feel worried about it, and also might be suggestive of issues with internal culture. I feel a bit worried that this isn’t a part of what CEA appear to be taking responsibility for addressing.
CEA’s obligations around confidentiality would also apply to the sharing of Frances’ experiences in the doc?
The sharing of the document with people who probably shouldn’t have seen it seems to have primarily been done by Riley in the original narrative (which is inappropriate, to be clear). The original post says that the people CEA’s HR shared it with was the COO and legal team. That seems appropriate to have done including in cases where CEA handled this well, as they would be the people evaluating if harassment occured and how to respond.
It sounds like a lot of really bad things happened in this case, and it may have been handled really poorly, but I don’t think from the narrative that has been presented so far there is strong evidence it was shared inappropriately by anyone except Riley (though of course if the description of the contents is accurate, Riley sharing it is a form of harassment).
CEA was aware it was shared with people outside of HR by Riley, even if they themselves did not share it outside HR.
And it seems then like any confidentiality obligation on HR is expunged, given that this Riley shared the document themselves. Or at the very least there’s no case for them failing to act because of the need to keep the document/its author confidential, as they had already shared it widely.
Yeah so I think they still have strong HR confidentiality obligations regardless of which staff Riley personally shares the document with, but I think at that point it is no longer strictly a “confidential HR complaint” and calling it such is an obfuscation on CEA’s part. Riley’s conduct also immediately triggers obligations to me under both GDPR and the Worker Protection Act. So I think it basically separates into two distinct issues: Riley’s complaint, whatever it was, and then his conduct within the document itself towards me (harassment). I think CEA should basically have treated these as almost independent events, even though they exist within one document.
If Riley had truly only shared it with HR, I think that’s probably still bad but it’s also completely manageable. The flow could be something like: one person, HR, receives document → identifies potential harassment and GDPR violation → sends back something like, “do not share this document further, I intend to quarantine it. Please rewrite your document to exclude any personal information about other employees. We will now need to treat this as two separate issues. First, the complaint you’re disclosing, which is your right to do and which we take seriously. Second, the additional conduct in the document, as it pertains to other employees, which we will need to address separately as it does not constitute a complaint.”
At the point it’s shared outside HR, the whole thing changes and I felt like I couldn’t seem to get that message across internally, even though it feels so obvious to me. Not to mention that the CEO is, well, the CEO. Everyone is in their direct reporting line. I was at the same reporting level to the CEO as Riley, and he had now read explicit sexual content about me without my consent or knowledge. That just seems so obviously indefensible and bad that I sometimes feel like I’m losing it.
You’re not losing it: it is obviously indefensible. I think you’ve provided more than enough information to make this clear, and anybody who doesn’t get it at this point is probably not worth your time engaging with.
You can ask the following question to any chatbot and you will get the same answer:
I work in HR. Employee A has sent me a long complaint about the conduct of another employee B. However, inside the complaint, employee A has included a detailed description of the sexual activities of a different employee C, which is unrelated to the company. What should I do?
I tested this on Chatgpt, Claude, Gemini, and Grok, and every single one urged me to separate the complaint from the sexual content and redact the sensitive information. And this is a much tamer situation than the one that actually happened!
They could have literally just asked a chatbot what to do, and it would have done a better job than their professional HR department.
One thing it might be useful for people to look at here when reflecting on the causes of the failure was how much experience the HR team had of working outside of EA organizations. If the answer is “very little” then maybe bringing in more experienced non-EA pros would help, but if the answer is “a decent amount” it’s less likely that will prevent future errors on its own.
Hey Zach, thanks for the response.
I know you are unlikely to be able to reply to this with anything meaningfully helpful, and this might be frustrating for you, but I just wanted to flag some things that from the outside seem at minimum incongruous.
I’ve typed this quickly and without visibility into all of the considerations and information you have, so apologies in advance if this is more uncharitable than you’d like. (emphasis in quotes added)
Sorry but presumably:
CEA’s obligation as an employer to evaluate complaints seriously also applies to Frances?
CEA’s obligations around confidentiality would also apply to the sharing of Frances’ experiences in the doc?
an employee raising concerns about something doesn’t shield them from all misconduct or harassment during the process of raising the concern?
What about the chilling effect of staff not feeling comfortable raising HR concerns, or even working in your organisation because empirically CEA don’t seem to take harassment / sexual harassment sufficiently seriously? Does the idea that multiple managers, HR, CEO, and COO of an organisation can allow a sexualised description of an employee’s rape (etc) to be spread in the organisation without their consent, disregard an offer from the community health team to step in, and take ~no actions for 9 months not seem like it might have some kind of a chilling effect (or more)? I recognise that it’s important for HR concerns to be evaluated seriously but it feels like this standard wasn’t applied in any meaningful way to Frances?
I hope you appreciate that it’s difficult to take this statement seriously; it really doesn’t seem like the issue here is that CEA was following a standard HR process, both during the 9 months, as well as after the complaint.
What standard HR processes include “designated walking paths” and “assigned meal times” as appropriate responses? Alternatively, it seems like CEA’s ‘standard HR process’ does not capture the fact that the kind of content circulated might very obviously be considered a separate HR issue? (I recognise you explicitly name some of these failings afterwards and I don’t want to discount that, I just separately don’t really think it’s very convincing that HR was ‘too focussed on following a standard process’ is a good excuse / representation of what happened, and wanted to call that out.[1]
Fair enough! Sorry if I’m reading too much into what might just be ~boilerplate. But acknowledging just the start time of the investigation makes it sound like you agree that this investigation should have been done, and once Frances advocated for this you took this seriously[2] (perhaps bar some ‘communication issues’ that you acknowlege).
But if:
CEA’s own legal team decided this was harassment
you later acknowledge[3] that creating a culture that prevents/addresses sexual harassment included staffing changes such as removing Riley, etc;
Then why did CEA propose things like “designated walking paths” and “assigned meal times” the first time round, instead of just taking action at that stage? This doesn’t seem like it’s just an issue of “CEA wasn’t proactive about initiating this investigation”, but also one where it didn’t take the investigation or HR processes for Frances appropriately seriously! Also, this does not appear to just an issue of Riley, or of HR here. This document allegedly crossed multiple managers, as well as your, and the COO’s desk! Should readers be concluding that somehow none of the people involved considered taking further action? Or that they did take more actions and it didn’t go anywhere? Or something else?
To be more explicit, right now it doesn’t seem like there’s any public information I can draw on to rule out something like “CEA took actions that appear consistent with them being motivated more by protecting themselves from legal and reputational risk, rather than because they are primarily interested in the wellbeing of their employees”.[4]
Given the seriousness of the situation I hope you understand me holding you to the public standard rather than base this off any positive personal interactions I may have had with you and any other CEA staff!
Part of the issue here is that even the groundwork that has already been laid did not help in this case right? What’s the reason the EA community, or prospective employees, should trust that things are different this time around?
(written in personal capacity)
Perhaps I’d be more convinced by something like “existing processes were grossly inadequate +/- not applied consistently”, for example
“We have an obligation as an employer to treat such complaints confidentially, evaluate them seriously...”
“In particular, we need to create a culture where there is more organizational ownership and proactivity to prevent and address sexual harassment. We’re laying the groundwork for some of those changes via new staffing (Riley no longer works at CEA, we have a new HR manager, and multiple additional hires are on the way).”
See also the extent to which the effort CEA put into it changed once Frances informed the board that she was considering going public
I received this in my DMs and am sharing anonymously on their behalf:
The sharing of the document with people who probably shouldn’t have seen it seems to have primarily been done by Riley in the original narrative (which is inappropriate, to be clear). The original post says that the people CEA’s HR shared it with was the COO and legal team. That seems appropriate to have done including in cases where CEA handled this well, as they would be the people evaluating if harassment occured and how to respond.
It sounds like a lot of really bad things happened in this case, and it may have been handled really poorly, but I don’t think from the narrative that has been presented so far there is strong evidence it was shared inappropriately by anyone except Riley (though of course if the description of the contents is accurate, Riley sharing it is a form of harassment).
CEA was aware it was shared with people outside of HR by Riley, even if they themselves did not share it outside HR.
“If the description is accurate.” The document is unequivocally harassment, as determined by two independent investigators. This is not disputable.
And it seems then like any confidentiality obligation on HR is expunged, given that this Riley shared the document themselves. Or at the very least there’s no case for them failing to act because of the need to keep the document/its author confidential, as they had already shared it widely.
Yeah so I think they still have strong HR confidentiality obligations regardless of which staff Riley personally shares the document with, but I think at that point it is no longer strictly a “confidential HR complaint” and calling it such is an obfuscation on CEA’s part. Riley’s conduct also immediately triggers obligations to me under both GDPR and the Worker Protection Act. So I think it basically separates into two distinct issues: Riley’s complaint, whatever it was, and then his conduct within the document itself towards me (harassment). I think CEA should basically have treated these as almost independent events, even though they exist within one document.
If Riley had truly only shared it with HR, I think that’s probably still bad but it’s also completely manageable. The flow could be something like: one person, HR, receives document → identifies potential harassment and GDPR violation → sends back something like, “do not share this document further, I intend to quarantine it. Please rewrite your document to exclude any personal information about other employees. We will now need to treat this as two separate issues. First, the complaint you’re disclosing, which is your right to do and which we take seriously. Second, the additional conduct in the document, as it pertains to other employees, which we will need to address separately as it does not constitute a complaint.”
At the point it’s shared outside HR, the whole thing changes and I felt like I couldn’t seem to get that message across internally, even though it feels so obvious to me. Not to mention that the CEO is, well, the CEO. Everyone is in their direct reporting line. I was at the same reporting level to the CEO as Riley, and he had now read explicit sexual content about me without my consent or knowledge. That just seems so obviously indefensible and bad that I sometimes feel like I’m losing it.
You’re not losing it: it is obviously indefensible. I think you’ve provided more than enough information to make this clear, and anybody who doesn’t get it at this point is probably not worth your time engaging with.
You can ask the following question to any chatbot and you will get the same answer:
I tested this on Chatgpt, Claude, Gemini, and Grok, and every single one urged me to separate the complaint from the sexual content and redact the sensitive information. And this is a much tamer situation than the one that actually happened!
They could have literally just asked a chatbot what to do, and it would have done a better job than their professional HR department.
One thing it might be useful for people to look at here when reflecting on the causes of the failure was how much experience the HR team had of working outside of EA organizations. If the answer is “very little” then maybe bringing in more experienced non-EA pros would help, but if the answer is “a decent amount” it’s less likely that will prevent future errors on its own.