Where Is The #metoo Movement Is Now From An EmployerEmployee Perspective With Deb Muller of HR Acuity

William Tincup: [00:00:00] This is William Tincup and you are listening to the Recruiting Daily Podcast. Today we have Deb on from HR Acuity, and our topic is Where is the H? Where is the Me Too movement is now from an employer and employee perspective. So essentially, Deb and I were going back and forth on a bunch of different topics and I really wanted to talk with her and get her take on me too.

Been several years in the news. Super [00:01:00] important. I think it’s actually some of the reasons that we’re talking more about d e I now than we were prior to Me too. I know I learned a ton during this whole entire process, but I want to get her to take in terms of movement and different perspectives, both an employee and the employer.

Deb, before we jump into the topic, Would you please do us a favor and introduce yourself and HR Acuity?

Deb Muller: I sure would. So thank you for having me again. Sure. And I think the last time we talked, since the last time we talked, the world has been turned on its head, so Yeah. Yeah,

William Tincup: yeah. Fun times.

Deb Muller: Which sort of falls into what’s going on. But so I’m Deb Mul. I’m the CEO and founder of HR Acuity. I am also a recovering, or I think maybe a recovered HR professional, ER professional. So I was one of those founders who did the job, saw some gaps and said, gee, I can build technology, even though I had no idea how to do that.

But it’s worked out pretty well. HR Acuity is [00:02:00] a comprehensive employee relations technology platform. It manages the employee relations processes, we like to say, from allegations through aftercare. Our product focuses on empower providing tools and deep analytics to the hr, the employee relations and compliance teams, as well as really guiding and empowering the managers and the employees along the way when something goes wrong at work.

We have been adopted by over 300 enterprise organizations, including LinkedIn, Lyft, Adobe, Workday, just to name a few. I always say, people say, where does your solution fit in? And I say do you have employees? And that’s

William Tincup: there, right there.

Deb Muller: Yeah. That’s the bar. That’s the bar typically,

William Tincup: are you breathing?

Do you have a pulse? That’s right.

Deb Muller: That’s right. Because the, we really can’t hide from these even in HR Acuity as we’ve grown, we have to really look int internally and see how are we managing the relationship between our employees[00:03:00] the organization, laws, building trust and culture.

It’s stuff that we grapple with just as an organization itself.

William Tincup: So one of the things I keyed in on as you were talking was when things go wrong. That probably when we talked before, when Me Too first came up, and this is, right before, right around the time Alyssa Milano retweeted the the hashtag and it started to a momentum in and of itself.

I was shocked as a male. I was shocked that people were shocked. Huh? Huh? This is so dark, right? So I just assumed this stuff happened in Hollywood, in Wall Street and Silicon Valley and corporate America. Like I just assumed that was just how it worked. Yeah. I just, not that it was right or wrong, that of course it’s wrong, but I just assumed that was just, But when I when people when the outrage first came out, I was like, how can you be outraged?

Yeah.

Deb Muller: I think it was, a lot of it was that collective voice saying we’ve had [00:04:00] enough. Because we’ve been assuming this is going on. And it’s interesting a few weeks ago I did another webinar and I was thinking about it when I thought about our conversation. About the evolution of employee relations and, we recently introduced an employee relations maturity model.

But one of the things I looked at was my career, so that’s right. I was thinking about my career and what’s happened and so I’m gonna be very vulnerable now and give some dates that I probably wouldn’t normally wanna give. But my career started in HR in 1987. So I what’s happened during the course of my career and I put it into kind of free Me too and post Me Too, pretty much.

And so we look at 1990 1987 to about 2015, 16. Not a lot happened. We had some regulations that came out that were good for employees, Americans with a disability act family medical lead, equal pay. So we have these Affordable Care, the Warrant Act, which now is saying, having a resurgence now.

The only thing that really [00:05:00] happened early on in my career was in 1991, we were introduced to a woman named Anita Hill. And that was the first time, at least, I don’t know, maybe it happened before that was when, first time for me, I was in, the work world right. At that point. And harassment in the workplace was actually something that you spoke about. People were talking about it. And acknowledging despite, what, maybe nothing really happened that occurred. But that was it.

William Tincup: And then yeah the nothing really happened thing. It did become a part of our consciousness.

Nothing, I don’t think the act, obviously the action didn’t happen, but at the highest level of our court system, there’s the implication, I think pretty well founded implication that something was wrong and I think, yeah, something was right, something was wrong. No, something was not quite right.

Okay. And the action was, I don’t think, I don’t think the action, I think the failure there as a society, the failure for men, women, everybody else, was [00:06:00] that we didn’t take the action. We didn’t hear her and then say, what is more of this going on? Is this really going.

Deb Muller: Or even do we believe her?

So there’s a whole other,

William Tincup: Oh, I believed her. I believed her. Yeah, course. Hundred percent.

Deb Muller: I know the side you’re on and you know what side I’m on. Yes. But I,

William Tincup: I believed her, this the jaded part of me, but I believed her because of what the political impact would be to her life.

Like what all she had to risk. You’re not gonna, you’re not gonna risk that. It’s not true. That’s just not like she put everything on the line, so I immediately believed her. That’s just, and also fast forward. Yeah.

Deb Muller: Fast forward, we were dealing with the exact same issue with another Supreme Courts nomination.

I,

William Tincup: what is it about the Supreme Court?

Deb Muller: I dunno. I don’t, but two women. What have they got to, like what they’re putting themselves on the line here? [00:07:00] Yep. Cookie Blaze word, a very, productive, she was doing, she a brilliant woman, but she didn’t wanna step in the limelight until she felt she had no other choice.

Because it such a hard level. But I do think you’re right. It was going on, we started doing harassment training, certainly in the HR space. Yep. We were looking at it, we were aware of it. But it’s even when I started HR Acuity, so my product actually came out in 2009, and one of my challenges then was educating people and making them care, right?

Making this be something that they required not just a nice to have, and it really took a while and are. And if I look at the trajectory of my company, and I don’t wanna say Me Too helped it, me too. I’m glad it happened, it brought that conversation. But what happened Post Me Too.

And if I look at that, okay, so that was the first half. Not a lot was going on in the er, ethernet. And then we had, after 2016 and beyond, a lot of shit went down. It continued, right? Oh, so in the last. The [00:08:00] last seven years we’ve had Me too. We’ve had the Supreme Court, we’ve had this thing called Covid.

Yeah. We’ve had the economy. We’ve, I, it’s just, it’s, we’ve had decisions in the Supreme Court that have, we, all of a sudden the world has come into the workplace in a way that we have never dealt with it before, and I think has made it so this can no longer be ignored. No.

William Tincup: No. And again, as a, as an employer, if you ignore this, you do it at your peril on a number. On a number, not just the legal, ethical and moral okay, that’s stay, that’s table stakes at this point. It’s everyone’s got a Twitter account. Like you, you’re going to you’re making, first of all a toxic environment like that.

You’re making it hard to recruit people. You’re making it hard to retain people. You’re just making it harder. Like I think before people would say you know what’s really the, we have a toxic employer, we have a, career sexual harassment, person on our staff. What’s the [00:09:00] real downside?

Now the real now the real downside is far more than just that. Per that person. It’s right. Which is good. It’s gotta be punitive because we’ve proven to ourselves. If it’s not punitive, people won’t do it.

Deb Muller: Absolutely. Every employee walks into work with a camera. The video camera.

Good. Call everyone all day. The other thing that I think people really have to think about on the broader level is who’s going to work every day has changed. So I, I’m a GenX, which I can’t believe, but I’m on the old end of the GenX. So I don’t, I’m not a boomer, that’s for sure.

GenX,

William Tincup: I’m GenX too and I totally separate myself from boomers as well. It’s so great. I know.

Deb Muller: I don’t feel like a GenX either. We’re this lost, I dunno, there’s little bit in there, but. But think about when we think about the Anita Hill, what was the people that had been in their careers that were in senior leadership roles that were entering the workforce?

So I was entering the workforce then. [00:10:00] And think about the makeup of the workforce now. We have Gen Z, right? So the old Gen Zs are 28, almost 30. The millennials are 29 to 43 now. Yeah. They are our workforce. And so they entered the workforce. At a very different time. Very different time in the late, and they also grew up in a different time.

They are much more to, much more tolerant of others. Of different culture. This is a wonderful thing. Patients. I look at my kids and they I remember one of my, one of my sons growing up and freedom to marry was on the table, and he’s I don’t even understand why this is a big deal.

I’m like, oh, I love you. Yeah.

William Tincup: It’s interesting because it’s is it’s looking at tolerance in two ways. Especially with millennials and Gen Z. There’s a tolerance for all this. Cool stuff that wasn’t a to, there wasn’t a tolerance level there before. Same sex marriage all kinds of things that [00:11:00] just there just wasn’t tolerance.

But there’s also an intolerance in the sense of like, when I, my first job, pizza Hut, I was probably 15, 16 years old, like dating at work. That wasn’t just that wasn’t normal. Like you, you dated people. We’d get off at 10 or 11 o’clock at night. We’d go out like it.

That wasn’t, there wasn’t any, I’m sure there was other things that went on, but that was just, Normal in, in, in retail, the same thing. Absolutely. It’s normal. But I see like in Gen Z and with millennials, I’m jealous in this sense, they’re intolerant of that. You know what I’m saying?

We didn’t, or I didn’t raise my voice or didn’t think that anything was wrong. They know things are wrong and they’re willing to raise their voice or not work at that place or whatever.

Deb Muller: And I think a lot of that comes from how they grew up. These kids went to [00:12:00] school with anti-bullying campaigns.

Love. Good point. Harassment school. Right when you’re a school. So they learned that to say something. When you see something to be an ally to certainly became empowered, they became equipped to do that. We were not brought up that way. No. At least that wasn’t right. You took your career, get that courage and to wonder what would happen.

So they’re now in the workforce. Now they’re, they think for themselves. They’re not as likely to just follow along what authority says. And so organizations have to pay attention to that because this is your workforce. That’s right. And, they’re bright. And so I think when we think about me Too and, even, this work from home and we also think about mental health and, that we’re talking about now in very different ways than we ever did.

Senior leaders have to make this a priority. They and if anything Covid did on the positive, was it highlighted your human resources, guess what? They’re actually pretty [00:13:00] important. Yeah. They’re pretty important to your organization. And you want them to be there when you need them. You want them to trust you, which is a whole other conversation.

Otherwise they’re gonna leave. They’re actually more likely to leave. They, oh,

William Tincup: a hundred percent. Yeah, there’s there, again, that intolerance and I think, transparency is one of the things that, that also comes into this is we used to live in a le in a less transparent world, which actually would shield some of these predators because it just, people didn’t know.

Now that’s just not the case. It’s well-documented that where the problems are. The question I have is, so Me Too, love is love. Black Lives Matter, George Floyd, all these times, things bring our consciousness, thankfully, to a place where we probably should have been 30 years ago.

Okay. We’re a little bit behind. Got it. However, I’ve seen Me too, get talked about less, and I don’t know if it’s just the [00:14:00] media or if it’s the conversations and blogs and podcasts and things that I pay attention to. It’s just, it’s, it seems like it’s lost some of its luster and I think, I don’t know if it’s that it’s happening less.

That would be a hope, right? The hope is that this made our consciousness, everyone’s aware, men learned lots of lessons on what to do and how to be allies and all that type of stuff. Great. And it’s just not happening. Okay? That would be the optimal outcome. I don’t believe that for a moment.

So what’s your take on kinda like the balloon. That was a wonderful balloon of okay, this is important. We’re all talking about it. We’re all learning. Stories are coming out from everywhere, which is great. And then, yeah, fast forward, and again, you’re right, the pandemic, a lot of things got in away, if you will, but it is it happening less?

Are we hearing about it Less? Are people not talking about it as they did? [00:15:00] What’s your take?

Deb Muller: I I don’t, I hope it’s happening a little bit less again, cause of the the generational change and things like that. We actually are Joe just getting the data from a survey that we did.

So let’s do a podcast. After when I had that data, cause we went and asked 2000 employees just questions. Oh, cool. To really. Yeah, we, I’m just talking to some of my team, so we just got it back, so I don’t know what it is. But I think there’s a couple things. It did get mushed in with Black Lives Matters, and like literally it was the it was the beginning of everything in our world turning upside down.

Me Too, as itself, there’s a lot of other noise in the system with what’s going on, it’s, and it’s not unrelated to things like accessible healthcare and, political issues that are going on. I think there’s some unfortunate stuff here. There’s this crusade, there’s a little bit of a woke crusade against everybody’s out to get men.

Toxic, toxic man masculinity don’t, this is not my view, but I, there’s some of that, people have rejected it. And then there’s been some unfortunate things we saw [00:16:00] with the media. When we saw the Johnny Depp and Amber Herd case. I didn’t call it word for word, but the media really rushed to Johnny Depp’s side.

And that was, it was unfortunate, whatever. So are we, was that a couple steps back? And again I’m not a expert on that case, but that was something that you felt like, wait a second, here we go again. We’re ba we’re taking those two steps back and we’re, allowing someone sort of celebrity.

It’s

William Tincup: The false outrage of men. In general about things are being taken from them. It’s that’s just dumb. Like anyone that wants to bring that argument up to me, I’m just like this is, if you’ve studied Western history or Western civilization or western history, like this is just a dumb argument.

Like that’s just, that’s

Deb Muller: privilege. Yeah. I’m pretty sure.

William Tincup: Yeah. And oh, by the way, it’s not being taken away from you. So like the woke, the anti woke. Folks that are, that just drives me batty because I’m like, first of all, it has no basis in reality. It’s, it [00:17:00] has basis in fear. I’m scared.

I don’t know what reality looks like when not in control, et cetera. Okay, if you’re scared, admit you’re scared. That’s okay. I can s I can see grown men, white men in particular saying, you know what, I’m terrified. Okay.

Deb Muller: Lean in and start educated and understanding and what you can do to be part of the solution.

As opposed to just, putting up your,

William Tincup: so I, Deb, I had to do that myself. I have to be honest, I had to win Me too first. When it first cracked, I’m like, I went out to all my friends that are girls and I said, okay, wipe off board. What do I need to know? What have I done?

What have I done wrong? Let’s just start with me is there anything I’ve done wrong? If so, let me apologize. Let me get, let me just, let me learn from this, because I assumed that everyone, that all, [00:18:00] everyone in America knew that this was happening. I just it floored me from that perspective.

So I probably spent a year. Talking to my friends, just all girls, men, useless on this topic. But I would talk to women about okay, first of all, what do you see? How does this happen to you? And then people would, my friends would gimme examples like when you go to a conference, do you get texts, after 10 o’clock?

Like text by whom? My wife? And, no. Like guys at the conference, I’m like, oh hell no. Like that’s a thing. And they’re like, yeah, that’s a thing. That’s a thing. And I remember being at a conference and it was with probably seven women and they literally, all their phones are blowing up at dinner.

Yeah. And I’m like, and my phone, of course is silent. So part of me was a little bit envious. Dark. Dark humor. Yeah. But a part of me was like, I can’t believe that, most of these people are married. What? This is insane. And this wasn’t that long ago, by the [00:19:00] way, but I,

Deb Muller: I’m just a plug for your, I dunno if you saw my LinkedIn post, but I happened to listen to your podcast with Dr.

Shirley Knowles about right. Microaggressions? Yes. Excellent. Hopefully people listen to this, then they’ll listen to that. They’ll like them both. But really, understanding the perception of the other person and understanding what they’re going through is the only way. To really, understand how you have to behave differently and change your behaviors.

It’s so

William Tincup: important. And you gotta want, as a man, you have to want to change your behaviors. You gotta see that, hey, the way we’ve done it in the past does, is. It didn’t work, then it doesn’t work Now. We made mistakes. Own the mistakes. Lean in as you said, so appropriately, just lean into it and say, okay, I, you know what?

I think South Africa did this really well on some level after a apartheid, when they did the Truth and reconciliation process where they just said, be honest. It doesn’t matter if you killed someone or you stole their land or you didn’t. Like [00:20:00] work. The details does don’t matter. What does matter is honesty and everybody just wash it.

I don’t think we had that, like that car, I don’t know. It’s that moment where all of us, both women and men and everyone else that’s had this go on that. Just get it all out in the open. This is the time like this is the moment where it’s okay. Whatever has happened, we’ll deal with it, but get it out in the open because my fear is the same fear that you have.

Is that okay? It’s just got quieter. There’s, it’s got quiet. Yeah.

Deb Muller: Yeah. Some things that are happened that are certainly egregious. You should know better. You don’t get a repeat on that, but I, but one of the things you said, which we talk about constantly with our clients, with our community, Is if we bring it back to the workplace, if you wanna make a change, it is about building that trust with your employees, right?

Employees now, back to the Gen Z, the new generation that’s at work, they have higher expectations for [00:21:00] transparency in everything because the world, as you’ve said, is so transparent. So we’ve started to see that. We’ve started to see that they, we have we got rid of the arbitration, forced arbitration.

We got rid of that. So that was a good sign.

William Tincup: That’s a great sign.

Deb Muller: Yeah. So we’re, you can’t force things to be confidential. There’s more transparency that we see. Another areas of HR pay transparency. Now many companies are grasp, what do you mean? I have to tell people what I’m gonna pay them in a job description.

Yeah. And even as a. Business owner. As a ceo, I had to figure out how is this gonna work and what are, how’s the right way to roll this out? But it’s a good

William Tincup: thing. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a problem. There’s, there, there’s there’s conflict. It’s friction because of what we did before, right?

It’s hard. It’s so hard. What

Deb Muller: is not easy? Change is not easy. I used to do this thing where people, what does it take to lose weight? And they’d say oh, you gotta exercise more. Oh, you gotta eat better. I’m like, okay. Know what to do. Why is everybody not at their like ideal weight that they wanna

William Tincup: so with employers and [00:22:00] employees, we’ve touched on it in a number of different ways, but so leaders that you deal with, how are they either being vocal or even being silent in terms of their approach to me too and uncovering conf creating a safe environment but also uncovering where it’s happening and getting rid of problematic, taking action.

Yeah.

Deb Muller: Yeah. The regular stuff is happening. Everybody’s, doing their training and their policies, blah, blah, blah. We, if that worked, then everybody thing would be perfect. So it doesn’t, that’s not all we have to do. The organization that we are working with are really coming at it from a place of trust and proactively looking, they’re putting their arms around employee. Let me give you an example. And this. This is related to me too, or any of those things that happened. Those what I would call moments that matter in the workplace. We have a company, and I’m not, it’s kpmg. And I love this. They know, I love it.

They’ve talked about it. They have a retaliation program where, okay, you know, companies, it’s illegal to retaliate against someone, right? [00:23:00] So if something’s happening, it’s illegal to retaliate against them if they’ve come up with a claim or they’ve been part of an investigation. So typically what we tell organizations is, We tell our employees oh, you’ve been harassed.

We’re gonna investigate. And guess what? If you feel like you’re being retained, and that was very hard for you to come forward. Now if you are being retaliated, don’t worry. Let us know. It’s against our policies. So basically what I’ve just said to an employee is you’ve just come forward to tell me something that was very hard in the first place and your perception is that it has harmed you.

There’s been some negative impact to you in some way or shape or form. Now if something bad happens to you again, come and tell us that too. Hundred percent. So you’re putting the onus on the employee where what they do is if someone comes forward, they actually tag them and and they start looking for underlying things in the workplace that could potentially indicate that retaliation is or could possibly be an occur is or could possibly have occurred, and then they’re fixing it.

The employee [00:24:00] may never know, but they’re putting their arms around their employee, they’re saying. We care about you. We wanna safe environment. Yeah. We’re not gonna wait for those bad moments that matter. We’re gonna be proactive,

William Tincup: not in our house. Do you see do you see ai, this is a little off topic, but do you see AI as a part of seeing some of those the dots that could be connected but not by us?

Do you see Yeah, go ahead.

Deb Muller: I think you can do it in ways even without ai, and we talk to a lot of our HR. Colleagues and they all want ai. Cause everybody wants, they start count the beginning. Okay, do you even count how many issues are happening because AI is great but you gotta walk before you can run.

That’s good point. Ways that people are okay. If I go back to Dr. Noel, she talked about microaggressions really at the individual level. What we are trying to do with our co our clients is look at them at the macro level. For example, we have a product called manager. It’s based manage er, it’s for the managers.

When something happens, there’s a behavioral issue, things like that. They [00:25:00] are They have the tools to document it, work with their HR team so that they know what to do, so that when HR says to them, make sure you document that they actually know where to document, how to document it, and then HR can help them, but also has the data.

So if you think about that data with something as simple as. A time and attendance issue. So managers go in, you’re late again, they document you fine. At least now we know we have it in the system. But if you start looking at that and using technology right, then the company HR person can be said, wait a second.

Did you know that we have on a higher percentage basis, Given more women of color written warnings for time and attendance than everybody else. Never see that otherwise. So it’s that experience. And so as a company we can say, gee, let’s just not hire any women of color because they’re late.

Do that. We’re gonna, why is that? Is it because they have more childcare?

William Tincup: Right. What’s it’s almost like looking at [00:26:00] homeopathic medicine. I don’t know if you’ve ever studied this, but like looking at what are the, what’s the root cause? What’s the underlying, cuz there’s, instead of just treating the symptom, like there’s something else that’s creating the symptom.

What is that? And getting to the root of that. I need to, I know we’re running short on time, but I wanted to ask you the employee’s perspective. Because we did talk their expectation of transparency and communication, but like with me Too, in particular, men and women, what is the expectation?

Expectation now coming into the workforce from, as an employee I

Deb Muller: think going back to the generation, they’re expecting something to be done about it, parti, and I think that’s what sort of Me too and the conversation is made that they understand now that something should happen. So if it doesn’t, they’re either gonna speak up or they’re gonna leave.

Again, the good thing. What we’re trying to do is really to give them the avenue to speak up. So when you finish an investigation using our tech, we don’t need our tech to do this. But you get a survey, were you treated with dignity and [00:27:00] respect? What is your issue in a timely manner, and how likely are you to recommend to a peer or colleague as an ally to come to H.

They have a similar issue. How do we quantify

William Tincup: this? I know. I was thinking about zero tolerance and just they might, they, this is, could be linked to quiet, quitting, but they’re not gonna try and change you. I think this is one of the things that, that I’m learning about employees as it is today.

They’re not like we would’ve stuck with a company. Thinking we could change them. We’re just gonna get in and we’re gonna change them. We’re gonna change the fabric. We’re gonna jump in there and we’ll change them. The, these folks, that’s not their bit, they’re not going, they don’t feel like they’re gonna change and they, by the way, they don’t wanna waste their time.

Deb Muller: You know what else we’re seeing now is if they, if let’s say they need the job, right? Cause some people don’t have the ability to just leave, but they don’t get that sense of inclusiveness and belonging with their company. Boom. Guess what they did? Yeah. They go and they get a union, and [00:28:00] that’s what we’re seeing now too.

Oh, wow. Yeah. From their employees. Th this generation wants that inclusivity. They wanna feel like they belong if they’re not part of a conversation with the company, if you’re not being transparent with them. They’re gonna stay. Yeah. Go to this other place. Maybe they can bring more transparency.

I don’t know if that’s true. And we’ll see in the end if they get what they think they get. But that’s what we’re seeing happening.

William Tincup: Oh, that is fantastic. I could talk to you forever, but I know. I’m sorry, Brad. No, it’s just, it just happens. Deb, thank you so much for a, the topic. And after you get the data, we’ll come back and do a part two of this because it’s fascinating to think about.

Okay. This has been, what, 2014? Yeah. Yeah. Yep. This is, we’re coming up on 10 years, right? So what have we learned

Deb Muller: 2017? Okay. Okay. Yeah

William Tincup: so yeah. We’ll get the next one planned. Thank you so [00:29:00] much for coming on the podcast today and the topic was wonderful.

Deb Muller: I really enjoyed it. Look forward to the next conversation.

William Tincup: Absolutely, and thanks for everyone listening to the podcast. Until next time.