63% of People Don't Report Behaviors Witnessed at Work That They Believe Are Disruptive to Company Culture, Productivity and/or the Business
Lack of faith in the system, fear of retaliation or reputation loss, and a direct manager being the offender are leading contributors to workplace silence according to a new study from Warble Inc.
SPARKS, Md., July 24, 2018 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Warble Inc., a company that provides online products to help businesses identify personnel issues, today released the first results of a new study that sought to specifically discover U.S. workers' feelings about a broad array of common negative workplace behaviors including bad attitude, discrimination & targeting, fraud, incompetence, poor management skills, sexual harassment, theft, unethical behavior and violence. The survey conducted in July 2018, surveyed 521 U.S. workers between the ages of 18 and 65. The first volume of the report explores the frequency of unreported disruptions in the workplace and the reasons behind it.
A key finding of the study was that 63% of employees have admitted to witnessing behavior(s) that they believed to be disruptive to the culture, productivity or the business, but did not report to either management or human resources.
"The big take-away in this study for us was the reinforcement of our company's founding hypothesis- there is a lot of bad behavior which occurs in the workplace that impacts the team and business, but is never addressed by management, simply because it is never discovered," says Warble Inc. founder and CEO, Carolyn Holliday.
60% of respondents selected a variety of reasons for not reporting disruptive behaviors, thus reflecting the complexity of the decision-making process. Among the reasons identified for staying silent, the top reason selected (46% of respondents) was a belief that "no action would be taken," indicating a serious lack of trust from employees towards their employers.
"What seems to be occurring is a cyclical problem," says Holliday. "Employees watch bad behavior go unattended and it reinforces a belief that there is a lack, or varying levels, of accountability in the organization. This fosters frustration, disengagement and increased distrust which only drives the likelihood of more unreported incidents in the future. Employers need to do more to show that they are listening, that they want to know and that they care. A company will never be able to fix what it doesn't know is broken."
Other leading factors deterring harmful or disruptive behaviors from being reported were fear of being labeled a complainer or seeming overly emotional, weak, or petty (39%), fear of retaliation (38%), and "My manager was the person behaving badly. (38%)"
To download this first report click here.
About Warble
Warble Inc. is a female-owned, Baltimore, MD-based company. Warble's mission is to help companies identify people problems before they negatively impact corporate culture and revenues. Our goal is to simultaneously supports both the business and the worker by enforcing a system of accountability for all.
Warble offers a safe, anonymous and free process for US based workers to report harmful or disruptive workplace behavior that they have experienced directly to an offender's manager.
For companies that want to take an even more proactive role in prioritizing a positive and productive environment, Warble offers a subscription product, Warble Pro Active, that provides additional features, tools, visibility and reporting.
To submit a warble or to learn more about Warble or Warble Pro Active, visit http://www.warble.work. Warbles are always free and anonymous.
SOURCE Warble
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