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.
Of course it is socially acceptable to disagree with “traumatized” people in EA. I do it all the time. It is very easy for me to say, “I completely understand why you want that, but here is why I disagree,” and then I lay out my arguments. You’ll find that “traumatized” people are just people, capable of conversation and critical thinking. Trauma is just one type of challenge humans have to navigate, but there are many challenges.
The world is not split into traumatized unclear thinkers and non-traumatised clear thinkers. Many people think unclearly, all the time, for a variety of reasons. It is important to learn how to communicate with different people, which is effectively what your comment is saying. We all have emotions. Trauma itself is not a binary thing where you either “are” traumatised or “are not”. Trauma as a diagnosis is a collection of symptoms which crossover with many other diagnoses, such as generalised anxiety, and so on.
Of course there are compromises, society at large is already making these compromises and many people are already thinking creatively about these issues. That is why we have things like laws, policies, codes of conduct, HR, social norms, and so on and so forth.