Turning bystanders into leaders can help keep people safe at work

The Respect@Work legislation that came into force in Australia in December 2023 sets out a positive duty for employers to act that is a world away from the minimum standards approach that has characterised past workplace laws.

The law creates an opportunity for all workplaces to think more creatively and fully about how to build more ethical and higher integrity workplaces. It also renews the challenges for leaders in workforces to counter the tendency of people being bystanders to the wrongdoing of others to achieve this goal.

In this article, we draw on our experience working with a wide array of organisations to explore how employers can use the changed legislative environment to turn bystanders into leaders.

The likelihood that an employee will report wrongdoing can be significantly affected by personal, situational, and environmental factors such as organisational culture.

People can face a variety of challenging situations in the workplace, such as witnessing harassment or learning of fraud or theft. Research indicates that people are significantly more likely to succumb to the bystander effect – and do nothing – when there are more people present who witness the event. The lesson for organisations? If few, or any, misdeeds are reported, it doesn’t mean they are not happening – in fact, the reverse might be true.

A further key driver of bystander behaviour is misguided loyalty: the perception that it is wrong – as Australians put it – to dob in your mates. This can deter people from speaking up and reporting serious wrongdoing when they see it in their workplace. This serves to normalise the wrongdoing and intensify the harms that this brings.

In the past decade, signs of how easily serious wrongdoing can take hold in organisations have been observed in Australia. It often appears in organisations bound by loyalty to the status quo, such as police and defence forces, in mining camps and even in the national parliament.

A variety of recent reports – an analysis of the Skype sex scandal at Duntroon, the ”Enough is Enough” Western Australian parliamentary inquiry into harassment and predatory sexual behaviour at mine sites, the report by the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission into Victoria Police around sexual discrimination and harassment, and reviews of conduct at the Australian and New South Wales parliaments – all make it abundantly clear that countering bystanderism is a key to ensuring our workplaces are safe and respectful.

In that context, the positive duty to act is potentially revolutionary in imposing obligations on leaders to take clear steps to counter tendencies in their organisations to ‘stand by’ in the face of wrongdoing.

The good news is some organisations are developing ways to ensure everyone plays their role in ending the silence and responding to wrongdoing.

A solution – developed by one of our clients – currently being tested in mining camps in Africa, Australia and North America has innovatively drawn on behavioural ethics – specifically the extensive body of work related to bystander theory.

At a mine site, if a person feels they are being harassed or are at risk of non-consensual sexual behaviour, they have been instructed to turn to a colleague and simply say ”Minerva”. (Minerva is the Roman goddess of justice.) This simple act breaks the grip of bystanderism and sets in train a clear series of interventions.

The genius of the system is that the colleague is then obliged to escort the person who has said Minerva out of the bar or canteen area at the site to a pre-determined safe place. Another person contacts security. Security intervenes and then a process leads to the removal of the person from the worksite and notification to the police if the circumstances warrant.

By breaking a potential bystander’s silence, the scheme ensures that people meet their ethical obligations to prevent wrongdoing. Further, the Minerva scheme makes it clear what people ought to do and makes them less likely to simply stand by in the face of others doing the right thing. In fact, it helps them move from being passive and helpless to active and taking a leading role in the solution.

These interventions at mine sites show that the grip of bystanderism can be broken and that organisational leaders can fulfil their positive duty to act. We believe there are five steps organisation leaders can take to end bystanderism:

1. Promote a ‘speak up’ culture. This is vital to support people to overcome the tendency to be ‘loyal’ and silent. Developing this open culture requires intent and a concerted change effort because the psychological and organisational forces to say nothing and keep silent are powerful. Culture change takes a concerted effort, organisational commitment, time and resources; however, it is possible and the benefits can be extensive across a range of workplace behaviours, performance and outcomes.
2. Listen to those who speak up. This involves ensuring their voices are heard and taken seriously, including by those at the most senior levels in the organisation. This is where leadership teams play a key role in ensuring that processes including the reporting of wrongdoing are in place and complaints are taken seriously. Protecting report-makers’ privacy is crucial to this step. Again, confidentiality, safe spaces, invested leaders and commitment to the process will build trust but take careful thought and planning.Given Australia’s record on sexual harassment and predatory sexual behaviour outlined earlier, leadership teams need to be particularly vigilant in responding to instances of bullying, sexual harassment, and discrimination against women.

   There have been multiple inquiries into these kinds of disrespectful and harmful behaviours finding that we should act before a crisis eventuates. A consistent finding across the reports is that early intervention and preventive action by leaders would have made a demonstrable difference.

3. Set and hold people accountable for high ethical standards. Leaders should insist that individuals’ sense of ethics drives behaviour to ensure that people are safe, respected and valued in their workplace. These qualities are readily identifiable in staff engagement and pulse surveys.Any sign that a leader acts expediently, does not treat people with respect or is rated low in trustworthiness is a red flag. If their business areas have high rates of bullying and/or harassment, it should be a call to action by other leaders and never accepted as normal. Organisations must also acknowledge that this can be particularly challenging when the behaviour relates to a leader in a position of power, with considerable influence or otherwise held in high regard (such as technical experts, rain makers or industry favourites).
4. Foster more positive cultures by modelling ethics in action. This includes calling out inappropriate behaviour when leaders see it. This is consistent with the positive focus of the legislation and can be carried out by leaders at any level.Micro-aggressions, gas-lighting, and taking credit for someone else’s work are all early warning signs of an unhealthy culture. Left unchallenged, they foster further and more serious examples of unethical behaviour.
5. Consider implementing processes and protocols like Minerva. Having an unambiguous trigger and a clear course of action can be a practical approach to help avoid decision paralysis or other forms of avoidance.

Holding people to account by asking direct questions about their behaviour and calling it for what it is – unacceptable – sends unequivocal messages about what will and will not be tolerated at work.

Leaders should talk about bystander behaviour to give people the opportunity to discuss how it can harm individuals, the organisation, and other stakeholders. Further, they can actively call it out and make examples of poor behaviour. They can discuss the new legislation in open forums and posit that every leader at every level has a moral obligation to act as an upstander.

Organisations can also equip people to identify unethical behaviour in their workplace and to know what to do to counter it. Doing this can remove the scourge of bystanderism and promote more humane behaviours in line with the highest standards of ethical behaviours and integrity.

These discussions should have a very positive note. Shifting from bystanders to upstanders means we can talk about what a positive duty to act means for the individual, the team, and the organisation.

The first person in Western ethics to use the term “human flourishing” was Aristotle, 2400 years ago. How we achieve human flourishing for ourselves and others at work is an apt way to translate the concept of a positive duty to act.

And how we help each other to reach our human potential is a powerful question to bring into workplace discussions about the new laws.

Get in touch to explore how we can help your organisation combat bystanderism.

Connect with Dr Peter Collins and Samantha Winnall on LinkedIn.

Prepared with input from Greg Evans.