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3 strategies to keep your best employees

Three cheerful employees working at laptops.

Though U.S. employers kicked off 2024 with the addition of 353,000 new jobs, the job-switching trend that catalyzed The Great Resignation continues at near record-setting levels. Some sectors are experiencing greater churn than others. At 5 percent, the quit rate in hospitality is significantly outpacing other industries, and engineers are increasingly seeking new professions altogether.

Hiring is just half the battle — particularly in an employment landscape transformed by artificial intelligence (AI), flexible work options, economic uncertainty and worker disengagement. Employers must adapt quickly to stop the revolving door.

As director of the Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies and the William J. Conaty Professor of Strategic Human Resources at the Cornell ILR School, Bradford Bell contends that while attracting top talent remains crucial, retention is the real test of organizational resilience. He recently shared three steps organizations can take to keep their best employees.

1. Foster a skills-based culture.

One challenge in the talent management space is the rapid transformation of jobs due to technologies like generative AI that have shifted the competencies employees must have to be successful at work.

“Companies can address this challenge by becoming more skills based. Understand and assess your employees’ current competencies and figure out what future skills employees will need to be successful in their work as their jobs and your business evolves,” Bell said.

Through industry research and trend analysis, leaders can identify skill gaps and train current employees to close them. Some organizations might see benefits in relaxing degree requirements for internal upward mobility and providing personalized learning in mentorship programs, on-demand courses and external online certificate programs instead. Leaders can also restructure performance reviews to evaluate employees based not only on past performance but also on skill development.

“The future of work is a whirlwind of automation and disruption,” Bell added. “Help your employees navigate change, solve complex problems and increase their value within your organization.”

2. Learn to lead from a distance.

Remote and hybrid work models are changing the nature of leadership. Organizations need new strategies to make up for the distance — real and perceived.

“Leaders must set the course for their teams, making sure that all members are clear about the mission, goals and expectations to avoid the conflict and confusion that can arise particularly when members are virtual,” Bell said. “Managers should also support the social climate by being more purposeful about orchestrating interactions and building relationships among team members.”

Department heads should empower employees to be more responsible for managing their own work. To assist workers, Bell encourages organizations to facilitate the effective use of technologies by ensuring all team members have access to necessary tools.

“Now that employees and organizations have experienced flexibility and the benefits that it can offer, hybrid work models are here to stay,” Bell said. “No matter where employees are located, leaders must ensure they are using technologies and tools in the right situations and can adjust based on how tasks and environments shift over time.” 

3. Drive a positive employee experience.

Replacing experienced personnel can incur considerable costs in recruitment and training. High turnover can erode morale in a manner that damages current team dynamics and fosters a reputation that repels new talent. By effectively engaging employees, organizations can mitigate these risks.

“When we look at the research, we see a few key factors that impact employee engagement: the design of work itself, learning and career development and leadership,” said Bell, who asserts that it is important for employees to perform meaningful, varied tasks and view their work as significant.

Bell encourages leaders to consider how they can design jobs themselves to be more engaging and ensure that employees have access to professional development opportunities that present clear career paths within their organizations.

He encourages managers to look inward as well: “Leaders who are more transformational as opposed to transactional — those who can build strong relationships with their employees — are able to drive higher levels of engagement within their teams.”

Bell also encourages leaders to examine how they listen to employees, formally and informally. He recommends that leaders capture employee sentiment and voice through surveys and one-on-one discussions.

“This needs to be a multichannel and ongoing process in which organizations and leaders are constantly listening to employees, identifying the pain points employees are experiencing, taking action on the feedback and communicating back to employees the changes they are making,” he said. “Through that listening process, you create a productive cycle that enhances employee engagement and increases retention over time.”

Learn the latest best practices for talent management in one of Cornell’s online human resources certificate programs, including several coauthored by Bell: Hybrid Work Strategy, HR Analytics, Recruiting and Talent Acquisition and Strategic Human Resources Leadership.

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Is It Time to Return to the Office?

Many Americans favor the flexibility that comes with working from home, a sentiment captured in recent surveys showing that more than two-thirds prefer remote work options, and nearly a third would willingly accept a lower salary to maintain this work style.

While introducing remote work or hybrid models can meet employee desires for greater autonomy, it raises concerns of potential disconnect, reduced team synergy and decreased retention rates. Employers are faced with the challenge of evolving a work environment that respects individual preferences and maintains the integrity and collaborative spirit of a cohesive workforce. Finding a balance is critical.

In a recent Keynote webcast, “Work from Wherever,” Nick Fabrizio, a distinguished senior lecturer at Cornell’s Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy, shared his views on the return-to-office debate and key perspectives of both employees and employers.

What are the main causes for dissatisfaction among remote employees?

Fabrizio: “In a new Gallup survey, it’s stated that only 28% of workers feel connected with the organization and that is at an all-time low. Last year it was 32%. You would think that with a variety of different work arrangements, people would be really satisfied. But in terms of being connected with the organization, it’s not there. And that should be alarming to organizations.

People complain that they don’t really know what’s going on in the company. They know what’s going on with their projects and their responsibilities, but they often feel they are losing connection to the whole organization.”

Why do companies want employees back in the office?

Fabrizio: “There are a few things that are complicating this. One is the feeling of disconnectedness at work, one is retention and another one is losing bright young workers because there is no process for them to be evaluated, connected and advanced in the organization. Organizations feel like they can’t create those opportunities being disconnected.

A lot of these organizations now are paying a lot of money in real estate for empty offices. That can’t continue. Some industries are going to force people back because of that. While others are going to force workers back because they are working on recruitment and retention, and others will force people back because they have a hybrid arrangement strategy.”

How can remote leadership be practiced in virtual work environments?

Fabrizio: “As an organization, what you want to create is touchpoints. Managers must deliberately try to create connections so that remote workers can make connections with other people in the organization.

There are five or six different modes for us to communicate, and some workers are saying they feel overwhelmed by that. Organizations should pick one method and do that. It’s very hard even for the worker then to realize and look at a Teams meeting at 3 p.m., [a client Zoom meeting] at 2 p.m., something else happening at 4 p.m., so they start to feel disconnected because there’s so many different mediums to keep track of.”

How can employers encourage productivity among remote employees?

Fabrizio: “Certainly not more forced interactions, but I think it’s the employee’s responsibility to be deliberate about keeping track of what they’ve accomplished. Sort of your value to the organization. It’s like a personal self-inventory of what you have accomplished, what you feel like you mean to the organization, how the organization is a benefit to you.”

Which work arrangement will become the new standard in the future?

Fabrizio: “I’m very effective working at home. Now, [I’m] hybrid, so I have that client-facing part of my work, but when I come back to the home office, I’m very productive.”

I think we’re going to quickly go to a hybrid scenario where better-performing organizations will have to define what their work arrangements are for different business units within the organization. I think organizations will have to do a better job of defining within the same organization what roles [will] be five days a week in office, two or three days in office and what roles are going to be completely remote.”

​​Discover how Cornell’s remote leadership and hybrid work strategy online certificate programs can make you a better manager and equip you with the competitive advantage needed in today’s evolving world of work.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. Experience the full Keynote “Work from Wherever” online.

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What is Your Style of Decision-Making? Strategize for Influence.

Imagine unlocking the secret to success in both business and day-to-day life. It’s all rooted in one critical talent: strategic decision-making – the essence of exceptional leadership, the engine driving meaningful change, and the spark igniting innovation.

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn, adjunct professor in Cornell’s SC Johnson College of Business, is a pioneer in shaping our understanding of this crucial skill. She is an accomplished author, educator, the creator of the AREA Method – a game-changing problem-solving approach – and the author of the Complex Decision-Making Cornell certificate program.

Her insights have reshaped how leaders steer their decision-making strategies and offer valuable lessons for navigating the complexity of the corporate world and your career.

Einhorn shared some key decision-making guidelines in a recent Keynotes webcast hosted by eCornell:

Understanding Strategic Choices

Einhorn believes that our problem-solving styles are behaviors with which we feel most adept and comfortable. She asserts, “we all have a comfort, a dominant problem solver profile. And we can all become more dynamic problem solvers.” This perspective champions the inherent adaptability within each of us to navigate different problem-solving styles.

The Adaptability of Problem-Solving Styles

Contrary to popular belief, problem-solving styles aren’t prescriptive. Instead, they offer space for adaptability and growth. Acknowledging our problem-solving styles provides a valuable opportunity for self-awareness and interpersonal development.

Einhorn defines five distinct styles of decision making that offer unique perspectives into the world of strategic problem solving:

The Adventurer: Einhorn describes the adventurer as “a very decisive decision maker. She knows what she wants. The future is endlessly more interesting than the present.”

The Detective: With a strong need for concrete evidence, the detective is “a slower decision maker because she wants to find data.”

The Listener: This style of decision maker is “relational, collaborative, trusting,” Eihorn said. “She emphasizes the importance of gathering input, and she likes to gather the wisdom and opinions of others.”

The Thinker: Someone who “values understanding the why and thinking about the different options.” This style represents a “thoughtful, careful decision maker.”

The Visionary: “A big, creative, out-of-the-box thinker.” Einhorn warns, however, that “this kind of decision maker could have a planning fallacy.” Visionaries can dream big and are often the source of innovative ideas, but they must stay grounded to avoid unrealistic expectations.

Decision-making styles are dynamic, changeable over time, and influenced by various factors such as age, experiences, and environments. For example, your style at work might differ from your style at home. Einhorn explains that you have the freedom to choose your problem-solving style based on the situation: “You could decide that you want to plan a meal as a visionary. You want to take a vacation as an adventurer. You want to buy insurance as a detective. And each of these opportunities are available to you once you understand the five different profiles.”

No “Perfect” Combination

Harnessing the power of strategic decision makers isn’t about achieving a “perfect” combination of problem-solving styles. The real value lies in understanding and leveraging diverse profiles to become more effective leaders.

Awareness of these profiles can offer insights into the kind of information each leader needs and highlight any cognitive biases that might obstruct effective problem solving. “You can learn what this means that you’re good at and the places where each of us might have mental mistakes that are most relevant to getting in our way. And then how we can make better choices together,” Einhorn said.

With this knowledge, we can fill gaps in perspective, ensure a more comprehensive understanding of situations, and contribute more effectively to collective problem-solving processes to foster strategic leadership and decision making.

In mastering the craft of strategic leadership, we pave our own route toward personal and professional achievement. Adopt an introspective approach and learn to leverage your unique problem-solving styles in Cornell’s Complex Decision-Making certificate program. You’ll gain a dynamic skill set to boost your confidence, empower your choices, and drive significant change in all aspects of your life.

Watch Einhorn’s Making Difficult Decisions Keynote webcast on the eCornell website.

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Navigating the Future of Hospitality Management

Labor market shifts and workforce issues continue to challenge the hospitality industry due to the lingering effects of global travel restrictions and safety protocols during the COVID-19 pandemic. With decreased interest in hospitality jobs, many people exited the industry, creating a need for new talent and a push to bring back those who left. The profitability of travel and tourism businesses relies on how well hospitality leaders can address these issues.

In the Keynote webcast, “The Next 100 Years: Hospitality Workforce of Tomorrow,” industry experts J.D. Barnes, vice president of global workforce innovation and optimization at Hilton, and Katherine Grass, CEO of Optii, joined Cornell Nolan School of Hotel Administration faculty J. Bruce Tracey, professor of management; Vincent Slaugh, assistant professor of operations management and Tashlin Lakhani, assistant professor of management and organizations, to share valuable insights on adapting and thriving in the evolving landscape of human resources in the hospitality industry.

How have pandemic-induced labor market shifts transformed the landscape of HR in hospitality? 

Barnes: “The emerging trends around greater flexibility, the reset from the pandemic, the rise of the gig economy – all of these considerations are things that are now impacting the labor market. At Hilton, we’re keen on embedding greater flexibility, choice and control, bringing in the best talent and modernizing some of the roles and assignments within our hotels to make them more appealing to different generations.”

Grass: “It’s all about how to keep these new entrants into hospitality happy. How do you train them? How do you make things very easy for them? How do you engage in ways that maybe, as J.D. was saying, they were used to in other industries and offering that flexibility. And sometimes the challenge of hospitality is offering flexibility in new ways because you don’t always have that work-from-home option.”

What are some ways hospitality HR professionals can attract and retain talent?

Barnes: “We have an ability to bring in students who might not have traditionally looked at our employment because they can’t give up an eight-hour shift when they’re working in between classes or managing a workload. For them what’s important is a four, five, six-hour shift, which is why they may have looked at gig endeavors. And then similarly, (we have) encore retirees and people who have left the workforce but want some level of flexibility in between their retirement to pick up a different level of work.”

Lakhani: “We really need to focus I think on the retention and the growth opportunities, telling the stories but also creating the stories, showing them that there are opportunities for growth and that they can see their colleague being promoted to positions, and that there is really a space for them to grow and have a lifelong career.”

Grass: “There’s all these different (talent) pools coming in who maybe are not familiar with hospitality, so how can you embrace them, how can you help them, how can you train them and bring them into the culture as quickly as possible?”

Which positions are first in line when it comes to redesigning work?

Barnes: “I do think that housekeeping, in particular, is one of the biggest areas in our hotels from a staffing perspective. If you look at the contribution that those team members make in terms of the guest experience and the amount of time they take in preparing a room, that experience is important.”

Lakhani: “Some of the most severe labor shortages are in housekeeping or in the back of the house – where we can’t create hybrid work.”

Barnes: “The more information we can gather ahead of the arrival of the customer, the more we can infuse that into the actions that our team members take in delivering that service and experience. Technology is playing a big part in making sure that it’s seamless, that it’s fast, and that the preferences are known.”

What are the influences of AI and other technologies on hospitality management?

Barnes: “We’ve incorporated AI from a training perspective in our ability to use virtual reality in helping team members understand what their duties are, how to personalize services, the sequence of steps and things like that. It’s really interesting for us to think about how we’ve morphed training across some of our hotels.”

Slaugh: “I think we completely miss frontline service work as a domain for analytics. There’s a lot of opportunity for growth. In recent years, I’ve worked on a hotel’s housekeeping scheduling problem. And that’s just a new model for our field.”

Barnes: “Things like text messaging recruiting. A lot of this AI technology is coming in here. Being able to schedule a candidate and say, hey, come in three days. We’ll be able to interview you in person. We’ve got to modernize a lot of that approach to recruiting.”

Grass: “Just even the diversity on the language front when you are managing departments: There can be a dozen languages spoken, so how does your software in real time translate conversations for them? We ensure that we do inline and real-time translations so that if a team leader is communicating something in Spanish, everyone is receiving that in their (preferred) language. All those communications are happening in real time. It’s giving that sense of community and ensuring that everyone has a voice and can make that voice be completely understood.”

How can leaders in hospitality increase the industry’s appeal?

Lakhani: “We’ve seen innovation. We’ve seen compensation go up. But I think there’s still work to be done in terms of changing the perception of what it means to work in hospitality.”

Grass: “When you have this personal connection and personal interaction, (you ask) how can the technologies help me eliminate or simplify the rinse-and-repeat that gets a bit monotonous, especially for people who are new to an industry and step in and say, ‘Oh, this is really kind of same-old, same-old every day.’ How can you smarten up and remove that monotonous bit to allow people to have more quality time to interact with the guest in better ways?”

Barnes: “The greater desire is for us to continue to emphasize that life doesn’t have to fit into work, that work should fit into your life. And so enabling that functionality, enabling that choice and control for our team members across all our hotels. It’s also the flexibility of allowing that choice and control for the team member and for them to inform us about what works for them.”

Explore Cornell’s hospitality certificate programs to gain an edge in today’s transforming industry and prepare for the workforce of tomorrow.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. Experience the full webcast “The Next 100 Years: Hospitality Workforce of Tomorrow” here.

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New Cornell certificate emphasizes dialogue in DEI

Photo of group dialogue with one young woman facing camera.

In 2020, hiring for diversity, equity and inclusion roles surged. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, three years later – amid recession fears – companies are cutting DEI leadership positions at a rapid and disproportionate rate, leaving practitioners to seek new ways of continuing efforts to create welcoming work environments.

Dialogue for Change, a new online certificate program from Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations and the Intergroup Dialogue Project (IDP) delivered through eCornell, provides a fresh approach to DEI for team managers and supervisors, executives and all employees interested in building equitable cultures.

“The certificate focuses on four key development areas: human connection, social identity, intergroup communication and strategic change,” said Adi Grabiner-Keinan, executive director for academic DEI education and director of the IDP. “Our goals are to develop participants’ awareness around the four development areas and to strengthen their capacity to make meaningful change at personal, interpersonal and institutional levels.”

Together with Lisa Nishii, vice provost for undergraduate education and professor in the Cornell ILR School, Grabiner-Keinan is co-author of the Dialogue for Change certificate. The duo intends for the program to help professionals promote sustainable institutional change no matter their position on the organizational chart.

In three courses – Counteracting Unconscious Bias, Dialogue Across Difference and Strategic Influence – participants learn and practice skills for intentional connection and communication, and examine ways to impact change in different spheres of influence, including within their teams and organizations. These skills, according to Grabiner-Keinan, are crucial well beyond the field of DEI.

“Skills such as active and generative listening, strategic questioning, purposeful sharing, perspective-taking, withholding judgment and questioning assumptions allow us to lead, communicate and collaborate effectively,” Grabiner-Keinan said. “They enable us to broaden our perspective, learn from a variety of people and situations, bring people together, think creatively and create meaning and vision. Unfortunately, such skills are seldom taught in schools or colleges.”

Dialogue for Change engages students in weekly live sessions. Trained IDP facilitators guide participants through practice conversations within small groups of experts and peers. Each dialogue builds on earlier coursework, enabling the cohort to use new knowledge in real time. Students who complete the program earn professional development credit hours toward human resources and project management certifications.

Each student who earns the Dialogue for Change certificate, Grabiner-Keinan says, will recognize their power to foster inclusion, connection and equity in any role. “An integral part of this program is to identify the agency and responsibility that each of us has. It’s true that leaders and supervisors have more power in institutions, but this program helps people understand that they all have power to make change interpersonally and institutionally within their workplaces.”

The Dialogue for Change certificate program is now enrolling students. Visit the program website to learn more.

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Five Trends HR Leaders Need to Leverage in 2023

The rapid pace of workforce transformation is pushing human resources leaders to adapt for employment trends that have earned catchy monikers — the Great Resignation, quiet quitting and stay interviews. Yet, other underestimated developments are already impacting the dynamics of work.

Expert faculty in Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR School) identified five HR trends that will drive change for companies in 2023.

Read the full story on the ILR website.

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New eCornell program offers wellness counseling skills

Wellness – defined by the World Health Organization as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being” – is essential not only in the health care industry but in every profession and everyday life. However, creating a culture or achieving an optimal state of well-being can be challenging.

To better equip helping professionals, the Cornell Institute for Healthy Futures (CIHF) has developed a Wellness Counseling certificate program, offered through eCornell. Ideal for any human resource or wellness professional, this program offers best-in-practice, demonstrated counseling techniques and steps for achieving and creating a culture of wellness.

“Whatever industry a helping professional is in, the ability to effectively lead and curate a culture of wellness is integral,” said program author Beth McKinney, lecturer in nutritional sciences in the College of Human Ecology and CIHF faculty fellow. “This program develops those skills, enabling professionals with the tools to create rapport, elicit behavior change, have open and empathetic communication and enhance their overall effectiveness.”

This program consists of four two-week classes:

  • Understanding the Person;
  • Understanding the Deeper Need;
  • Eliciting New Behaviors; and
  • Promoting Organizational Wellness.

Upon completion, participants will receive a certificate from the College of Human Ecology and 40 professional development hours.

For more information, visit the eCornell website.

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Careers, Family, and Gender: Managing Effectively in Today’s Shifting Workplace

Over the past fifty years, America has seen steady shifts in the makeup of its workplace. Managing these changes in career, family, and gender have needed to be addressed by both HR and workers themselves. Pamela Tolbert, professor from Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, has been studying how social changes affect organizations and vice versa. She sat down with eCornell’s Chris Wofford to discuss how organizational leadership can address challenges for workers in today’s workplace and what they can do to create a more progressive environment that leaves everyone at the table more fulfilled.

What follows is an abridged version of that conversation.

Wofford: I think one of the through lines to today’s conversation, the thing we’re going to be talking about is work-life balance. Why is that an issue today? What’s the landscape look like? Give us some perspective.

Tolbert: So this gets into how organizations affect social life in part. And I think there are a couple of things that have led to this becoming a really big issue today particularly. I mean people have always worked, people have always had families. But there’ve been changes in both families and the workplace that have kind of lead to a perfect storm in how these two spheres relate to each other. We moved from the kind of traditional family where you have the husband is the bread winner, and the wife stays at home and takes care of things, to a place where you have dual earner couples are common place. And that change occurred pretty quickly actually. About 50% of all families, the husband worked, the wife stayed at home. By the 2000s, it was somewhere between 60% to 75% of the workforce were dual earners.

And then the workplace really didn’t change that much. You know, you have this big social change going on outside the workplace that affects it, not so much adaptation.

Wofford: I’m curious what companies are doing.

Tolbert: So there are a couple of major experiments in particular that I think are really promising. And part of the thing that makes them I think work, is that they’re really focused on rethinking how we work. Not just trying to help people manage work family relations, but the basic premise, these are a couple of experiments. One was done at Best Buy.

Wofford: What happened at Best Buy?

Tolbert: In the case of Best Buy, it was called Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE). So in that case it was started by their HR, but they were very conscious of the fact that part of what had gone wrong in the accommodations arrangements, where you have to ask your supervisor if you’re going to take a leave, or you have to make a deal to have flexible work arrangements. So it’s clear that it’s very important to get the supervisors involved in this. That it’s not something that’s just imposed upon them. So what they did was to bring together teams of employees and their supervisors, and the supervisor was responsible for helping the team come up with the ideas and to think the processes through essentially- everything is fair game. Let’s think about the meetings that we have. Let’s think about whether we could use technology more effectively to do things, rather than having all these meetings. If we made some kind of scheduling arrangements, could we then allow people to have more time off, so that they’re not having to be there constantly? Just to be more effective in thinking about the arrangements for coordinating and controlling.

Wofford: They would close the loop on a lot of their initiatives.

Tolbert: Yeah, yeah. So they could readjust. And it turned out it was a very effective program. I mean the employees were incredibly enthusiastic about it. It spread to a large number of others- it started at headquarters, and then it spread throughout the company, and actually a number of other organizations adopted it. They had data, it reduced turnover by almost half.

And the employees reported that they were getting more sleep, they had more energy, they could focus better, because of being able to control their work. So I think part of what’s important here is that because people were motivated to try and think, how can I work better? Because they have the carrot at the end, that your life would actually be improved. It’s not like, think how to work more efficiently so you can work more often.

With a national policy you could kind of provide incentives for employers to spread the work out a little bit more. Everybody would benefit. Including families. And all kinds of things. So that’s one direction that things could go. We also have model organizations to provide pathways. I mentioned the SAS corporation. There is a case study from … I think it’s in the Harvard. But anyway, it’s about this big data analytics company which has been around since, I don’t know, 1976 maybe. It’s a successful company. Always done well. This is the one where they have a 35 hour work week policy. Although people are also expected that if you’re needed you will be there. But the norm, you have a norm that work is not supposed to wake up every day of your life. They provide childcare policies. It’s a very employee centered company.

And the case makes it sound like Shangri-La. But the thing is is that it’s a private company and I think it’s easier to do that than in a public company because in a public company you start getting pressures from stockholders to cut out the fat and make it run more effectively. It is a private company but it’s had like a 10% sales growth on average every year since it was founded. Clearly it’s succeeding. It’s not like the “fat” is being wasted. You can’t make it an HR sort of project. You’ve got to get it spread throughout the company. But HR’s historically been sort of the champion of these kinds of initiatives.

So I think that the thinking about work and family as kind of integrated whole is an important thing for policy. For national policy but also for company policy.

Want to hear more? Watch the recorded live eCornell WebSeries event, Careers, Family, and Gender: Managing Effectively in Today’s Shifting Workplace, and subscribe to future events.

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Workplace Harassment: Making Sense of Rapid Developments in the #MeToo Era

Workplace harassment is a complex and multi-faceted issue that affects every industry. Susan Brecher and Katrina Nobles from the Scheinman Institute at Cornell University are faculty experts in the fields of conflict resolution, employment law, and employee relations. They sat down with eCornell’s Chris Wofford to discuss the various ways in which organizations can respond to workplace harassment.

What follows is an abridged version of their conversation.

Brecher: Katrina and I worked for the Scheinman Institute, which is the institute for conflict resolution at Cornell University. I am the Director of Employee Relations, Employment Law, and Diversity and Inclusion, all of which directly relate to today’s topic. Katrina is the Director of Conflict Programs for the Scheinman Institute. She works on many projects related to conflict both on and off campus. Harassment is a topic that often brings up conflict.

Nobles: In addition to our work with Scheinman Institute, we host a public workshop series. Organizations then ask us to bring the topics covered in the workshops to their offices. These training topics include employee relations, conducting investigations, and employment laws, as well as programs on cross-cultural communications and conflict. We also help build organizational structure around what was learned.

Wofford: What does harassment in the workplace look like?

Brecher: Federal law does not define workplace harassment, and therefore it is open to interpretation. The working definition of sexual harassment includes unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and physical contact. The other definition relates to all forms of harassment in the protected classes: race, gender, national origin, and age. Here, the focus is on verbal or physical areas of conduct, and how they denigrate or show hostility. The two areas of focus are power-based harassment, and environmental, or the existence of a hostile work environment. These all relate to federal law, but there are state and local laws with even greater protections.

Wofford: How do the workplace policies relate to the legal definitions?

Brecher: Policies contain the minimum legal standard, but many go beyond that. Companies are looking for a higher expectation of respect and dignity to bring them in line with their mission and value statements.

Nobles: For many, their mission and value statements represent the ideal. They want to represent these strong values. However, the actions and behaviors that would support this don’t often occur. Missions and values are hard to define and are perceived through multiple lenses.

Brecher: In our trainings, we encourage leaders to find out what the terms mean to the people they work with, instead of assuming they know the answers.

Nobles: We often talk about what respect and dignity looks like. For example, if you show up to a meeting late, is that disrespectful? Opinions differed.

Nobles: How do you account for differences in working style, or generational differences?

Brecher: Workplace styles don’t necessarily break down by generation. And while I know there are generalizations or stereotypes, and it gives us insights into individuals, that’s where we begin to have problems and misunderstandings. One of our goals is to really help people understand their reaction to behaviors.

Nobles: We approach each person as an individual. We try to understand employees’ working and conflict styles to determine how we work best together. We focus on individual culture, social identities, and upbringing. For example, what part of the country did we grow up in? The answers make a huge difference.

Brecher: There’s often a great “A-Ha!” moment when individuals can see you’re not attacking them, but instead recognizing that they come in with a different lens. Some of those lenses negatively impact behaviors.

Wofford: Are companies today concerned about liability?

Brecher: Most organizations are less concerned about liability and more concerned about media exposure, in particular social media. When I train managers I ask them, “Would you like to see yourself on the news engaging in these behaviors? Or on social media?” And all of a sudden another “A-Ha!” moment arrives. Managers need to know what to say because we tell managers they have to report. Some managers think, “If I don’t see it, I don’t have to report.” We now teach them that yes, they do have to do something. But we want them to feel comfortable speaking, so we teach them the words to say.

Nobles: Speaking up is powerful. We need to empower employees to speak up themselves if they’re put into an uncomfortable situation. If they’re not comfortable doing that, they need access to the appropriate channels where someone else can speak up for them.

Brecher: Too often, we’re reacting to the person that comes to us and says, “This person has been doing this for the last six months,” as opposed to supporting the culture in which that person may have said after the first time something happened, “I’d like to give you some respectful feedback.” Having those support points earlier on makes it a completely different organizational culture.

Nobles: Everybody has a different perception of what should be permissible, based on experience and culture. At work, our cultures are meeting everybody else’s culture, and we may have differences. Conversations help the shared understanding around actions and behaviors.

Wofford: Some HR managers are expected to have an enormous degree of responsibility. Is this fair?

Brecher: HR must partner with the experts in the organization to build relationships so that as a team, managers better understand their operations. Partnering opportunities are vital. You have to approach it as a group from an organizational perspective.

Wofford: Should managers learn to investigate instances of alleged harassment?

Brecher: Managers should not conduct investigations unless they know how. Sometimes this can be guided by people who have that expertise.

Nobles: The best tool is to have somebody from your organization attend a full training on how to conduct investigations, because it is complex.

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Adding It Up: Hidden Lifetime Costs of Sexual Assault and Misconduct

Victims of sexual assault, violence, and misconduct suffer in multiple ways following the crimes committed against them. Liz Karns, professor from Cornell’s ILR School, has been following the lifetime costs for victims of these sexual crimes. As both a lawyer and an epidemiologist, she is tackling the data from an interesting perspective and sat down with eCornell’s Chris Wofford to discuss the lasting effects for survivors both on campus and in the workplace.

What follows is an abridged version of their conversation.

Wofford: You are an epidemiologist and also a lawyer, so you’re coming at this from two very interesting angles that together make for a really compelling story, so tell me a little bit about when you started looking at this and your experience.

Karns: As an epidemiologist, I started thinking about it just in terms of the types of data we would have, right? But it wasn’t until I went to law school like 13 years after being an epidemiologist that I started applying it to sexual assault, and in that context, I treated, and I continue to treat those cases just as I would any type of medical malpractice case or environmental harm case. They are the exact same set of ways that we assess damage. We need the studies, we need the research, we need the experts, and, it’s been a while coming that we got all of those things together. But at this point, we have so much research, so much information that makes it quite clear that the cost is a lifetime cost, and that currently it is usually the person, the victim, who pays for that – and that’s my interest, is to shift that.

In 2015 we had like a banner year of doing lots of different studies, and these studies were all essentially asking the same, which was ‘Have you been sexually assaulted while in college?’ And, there was some slight difference in terms of the phrasing. This was a study that was done by Kaiser and the Washington Post, and we have 25% of people who were assaulted since starting college, 20% for women, 5% for men. We see pretty similar pattern across all the different places, right? It never varies in a big way. The one that says 27 AAU, this was a study that Cornell was part of. We had 27 different colleges that did the same survey, and it’s important to have this information because it’s consistent across studies. There’s so many people who will say, ‘Oh, but people just make that up or it was dependent on the respondents.’ There’s been a lot of reliability and validity testing on this and this is solid data. The sad thing is that this the exact same data that we had in 1987. The numbers are the same since 1987 – roughly 20% is a consistent thing and it has not changed with anything.

Part of the reason that we add this up is that money matters. Somehow when we start attaching a price tag, people become more accountable, and the different systems that we look at are the legal systems. We’ve got the criminal and the civil system, and the financial obligation that arises out of that. Let’s imagine that a perpetrator is found guilty, and under the criminal system, ordered to pay restitution. That means they have to pay the victim money, and that is a contract now. That cannot be discharged, under a personal bankruptcy, so it is something that will stay with that perpetrator forever until they’ve paid it off.

Wofford: Wow.

Karns: That would change the world.

Wofford: I would imagine.

Karns: This is the standard approach to all injuries. This is exactly what’s used in your car accidents, your slip and falls, medical malpractice, everything else, so it’s interesting that people don’t think of it when it comes to sexual assault. So it’s part of my job, to articulate it, and make people think about that. If we assign dollars, we’ll get societal change. I’m quite sure about this one. The person initially talks to the psychiatrist, and then talks about different situations that this arises in, to figure out how invasive it is in their life. I have had people who could not go to covered parking lots ever again in their lives, and that meant that they would drive 50 miles out of the way to go to a different train station because they didn’t wanna use that one that had the covered parking lot. That meant that she couldn’t take certain jobs, so it’s got this sort of ripple effect.

Wofford: Yes, exactly. So what I’m getting at, or where I was going with that was, linking this particular diagnosis to these behaviors, and I wonder often how that plays out legally.

Karns: Yeah, well, I mean it’s absolutely part of the case because you’ve got, first the initial injury, which is the assault itself, and that doesn’t have a huge amount of value, obviously, like in terms of money, but the ways that it impairs one’s life after that are what get documented. That is the job of the lawyer to go through and describe the day and the life – you bring in different experts to say, this person will have a very predictable set of problems when they have their own children, so that’s a cost that you should be thinking about.

So the expert is who ties this person’s diagnosis and situation and then projects it forward, and when I’ve worked on medical malpractice cases where we had something happening to an infant, we would do the same thing. We’d say this is what their life looks like in the future.

Wofford: Yeah. Okay, behavioral health, again, this is not a big surprise, that they are more likely to be using alcohol or hard drugs, and they’re aware that they need to cut down, so they are aware that they’re using it as a substitute for treatment, if you will. And then this is the one that the insurance company knows is that they continually use more healthcare than non-victims, so whenever somebody discusses, gosh, maybe we should decide this is a preexisting condition, you can see why the insurance company is interested in that ’cause these are very costly, they have higher costs, 20% higher.

Karns: So, when people start acknowledging that the assault occurred, and that’s a process in itself, and realizing that they need counseling, it’s not unusual to have a diagnosis come up from that. They don’t have to go and seek a diagnosis to say, ‘mmm, boom, I have it.’ It’s going to evolve, and you have this statute of limitations, so you have so many years afterwards, that depends on your state, to file this case, and so, you don’t have to seek it right away. If you’re gonna build a case, and you’re talking to your lawyer, right, a lawyer, then they will very much ask you, ‘Are you in counseling? Do you have a diagnosis?’ Most of us have health insurance that would cover some aspect of that so there’s some record of that as well.

Wofford: So you’re recommending that the damages are then directed to the perpetrator, legally. What is the state of the law, what’s happening out there, as far as cases like this? Is this line of thinking adapted?

Karns: Yeah.

Wofford: Okay, so this is nothing new.

Karns: This is not, nothing I’m doing is new. All I’m doing is calling attention to it in a different way, and the way that I check myself, if you will, is that I look at what are called default cases – these are cases where the perpetrator, who then became a defendant in civil court, never showed up and the plaintiff, the person who experienced the assault, has the right to make the argument of, ‘What are the costs?’ And then the judge assesses those costs and decides whether or not they’re warranted.

This is all about true economic loss.

But, compensation funds will actually pay for things like therapy, so you could get that immediate counseling that you need, it’s just onerous to get there. Second one is – I mentioned this before – criminal restitution. This is part of any court process, that the criminal court can order the perpetrator to pay the victim. And then finally, civil damages, and this is the one I think most of us are familiar with, where we undertake legal action. The plaintiff, the person who is the victim, brings the case against that defendant, and everything I’ve talked to today goes into that damages number, and then that number gets used all the way through the civil court process, so demand letter, complaint, arguments.

So shifting the burden is what we need to do. That is absolutely what we’ll have to do. So things we can change. One, sexual assault happens in schools quite a lot, and we need to address the fact that it interrupts their education, and we need to think about a student loan deferral on this. It’s absolutely mandatory. The legal ones, holding the perpetrators responsible. And then finally, support, engaging survivors in discussions about the economic impact.

Want to hear more? Watch an excerpt of the live eCornell WebSeries event, Adding It Up: Hidden Lifetime Costs of Sexual Assault and Misconduct, and subscribe to future events.