Your Work Friends
Unfiltered Takes. Real Solutions. Your Work Sh*t Handled.
Its not just you - work is bonkers. You get hit from all sides. Your boss. Your team. Your clients. Another org change. A layoff. Which makes you want to chuck it all and live off the grid.
Friend-to-friend? We get it. We're in it. And we're finding the best ways to handle your work sh*t so you don't have to go sell candles in Montana.
We're two leadership pros, and friends, hitting you with the latest news, expert interviews, and real solutions.
Your Work Friends
How to End Workplace Abuse w/ "Workplace Psychological Safety Act" Authors and End Workplace Abuse Founders, Deb Falzoi & Vicki Courtemanche
In the US, do you have a right to a safe, psychologically safe workplace?
Because, right now, there is no legislation protecting employees from toxic work environments. None.
Join us for an eye-opening discussion with Deb Falzoi and Vicky Courtemanche, founders of the End Workplace Abuse Initiative.
They are spearheading efforts to implement the Workplace Psychological Safety Act in 20 states by 2025, aiming to protect employees from toxic work environments.
Learn about their journey from being victims to advocates for change, emphasizing the need for accountability in combating workplace bullying.
Gain insights into recognizing and addressing abuse, and discover practical strategies for creating healthier workspaces.
Don't miss out on creating a culture of psychological safety at work.
Check out:
End Workplace Abuse: https://endworkplaceabuse.com/
Sign the petition: https://endworkplaceabuse.com/sign-the-petition/
Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered professional advice. We are not responsible for any losses, damages, or liabilities that may arise from the use of this podcast. The views expressed in this podcast may not be those of the host or the management.
Thanks for listening!
Hey! We love new friends! Connect with us!
The basic idea behind it is that we don't have protections from psychological abuse at work. If this bill passes into law, people will be able to sue their employers and or their individual perpetrators, Because right now, people who suffer from mistreatment at work will go to an employment lawyer and the employment lawyer will simply say I'm sorry this is happening to you, but there's nothing under the law that will protect you in this what's going on Mel.
Speaker 2:What's going on Mel?
Speaker 3:Not much. I went to a fun little estate sale this past weekend and I got like a 1950s black leather clutch that is awesome for $5. So you know win-win. That was good.
Speaker 2:Nice. I love estate candles. I love that kind of find right, yeah, yeah, especially all the vintage stuff. It was so well-made, a lot of it.
Speaker 3:This thing is solid. I'm like oh, I can throw out my target bag.
Speaker 2:That thing's going to last you a lifetime, you know.
Speaker 3:Truly, just get a little conditioner on there, it's all good, it's all good.
Speaker 2:How about you? Well, enzo got walkie talkies. Yeah, this morning I was washing my face in my bathroom. He's in the living room, which is a couple rooms away, and all of a sudden I hear him having a conversation with somebody else who's not in the house. There's no one else, oh, and so, yeah, learned that his walkie-talkies can pick up other conversations and he can talk to people, so we are now getting rid of said walkie-talkies. That is freaky. I I don't like that at all.
Speaker 3:You know it's like some, like trucker named Jim on his CB. What's this?
Speaker 2:And I was like what that's us yeah?
Speaker 3:Oh God. Anyway, walkie talkies are the best, though.
Speaker 2:Well, we had a really rad conversation with two women that are doing some pretty powerful work.
Speaker 3:a really rad conversation with two women that are doing some pretty powerful work, absolutely. We met with Deb Falzoy and Vicky Kortemansh, who are two fearless women leading the End Workplace Abuse Initiative across the US, and they are working to introduce the Workplace Psychological Safety Act in 20 states by 2025. And they recently presented this in Massachusetts and Rhode Islands. They're still working to get them passed in those states and they have moved on to several other states as well, so there's a lot in the works here. Ultimately, bottom line is they're looking to establish psychologically safe workplaces and getting this into legislation so that employees have rights to go after employers who don't establish psychologically safe workplaces.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the big thing here is that legal recourse if psychological abuse is happening and we know this happens. We know things like bullying and mobbing and systemic sabotage happen all the time and right now, for the most part, employees do not have legal recourse if that happens.
Speaker 3:No, they don't. And I think you and I spoke about this and I thought you brought up an excellent point, francesca where this is the new sexual harassment effort. Right, because, as you mentioned, 20 years ago, someone could have said you have a nice ass in the workplace and if you complained, what would the response usually be? Oh, get a sense of humor. And that quickly went away with sexual harassment protections. This just takes our protections to the next level, where you can no longer just abuse people in the workplace and get away with it. There's actual recourse here for the employee and man do? They have a lot of great resources on their website for folks. Yeah, if you're an individual or a team leader or a leader of an organization, we highly recommend you check out their site. We're gonna link to everything in the show notes. They have a ton of resources out there. They're also extremely accessible, so you can email them and reach out to them for consultation. And with that, here is how to end. Well, friends, we're super excited to uh meet today with the co-founders and representatives for end workplace abuse. Uh, and that's deborah falzoy and vicky Kordamanch.
Speaker 3:Debra started Dignity Together and she was really focused on helping workers who feel stuck in toxic work cultures and those who are healing from toxic work cultures, and really the goal is to help people take back their life, take back their power. Debra also has a podcast called Screw the Hierarchy and I did listen to a few episodes which I loved, and it highlights personal stories and the impacts of abuse in the workplace. Deb and Vicki co-founded the End Workplace Abuse Organization and they co-authored the Workplace Psychological Safety Act. End Workplace Abuse is an organization leading really a collective movement which is advocating for psychological safety at work. They are citizen lobbyists for protective legislation and policies. They're helping to build leaders who campaign for abuse-free workplaces and they offer coaching and playbooks to do this, which we love, and they're here to collaborate with organizations to help advance workers' rights. So welcome Debra and Vicki. How are you both doing today?
Speaker 1:Good Thanks so much for having us.
Speaker 3:Yes, thank you Absolutely. Thanks for being here. Tell us a little bit how did end workplace abuse begin?
Speaker 1:We both have lived experience with workplace abuse. We've worked on other legislative campaigns and we really wanted to put forth the strongest piece of legislation we could, while also walking the talk around how we organize in terms of creating a really collaborative environment, building as many leaders as we can in this movement, to create a national movement, because there are so many people affected by this who wanted to do something about it, and so we started. We got busy writing the Workplace Psychological Safety Act set up a lot of foundational things like the website. Psychological Safety Act set up a lot of foundational things like the website, talking points, documents, policies, norms to make sure our own culture is healthy and safe for people.
Speaker 4:I'll just go a little bit before that, because we both have lived experience around this and she had been bullied in the workplace 10 years before me. I saw her postings on social media and she was actually the first other person that I met who had experienced workplace abuse and I was very sick when I came out. I had a lot of health issues and I wasn't really able to do much of anything. But the work that she was doing really gave me a lot of hope and it was probably about four or five months deep that we finally did meet up in person and as I continued to get better, started doing little things that she would ask and she's always good about that, always making room for everybody to step in and have a voice in this or help in it we kept getting like deeper and deeper, help in it.
Speaker 3:We kept getting like deeper and deeper and, as Deb eloquently already said, we found ourselves in this space that we could do it differently than what we saw out there. I love it. It starts with one step right. Coming together and collaboratively is a really powerful story. Tell us more about the Workplace Psychological Safety Act. What is the? I know there's a. The bill is a lot of language, but what is the if you had to explain it to someone like they're five? What does it encompass?
Speaker 1:The basic idea behind it is that we don't have protections from psychological abuse at work, so at a baseline it gives people legal recourse for what we call a toxic work environment that a reasonable person would deem toxic. Right now, the major source of protections that people have are anti-discrimination law and, looking at the history of that law, the courts really moved from looking at impact to looking at intent years later and it really watered down the strength of that law so that if you feel like you're the subject of racist or sexist ageist, ableist, any type of behavior that's protected under that law, then you still have to prove the intent of the perpetrator, and that sets a really high bar In looking at the way mistreatment works at work. We wanted to focus on the behaviors that happen and enough of a baseline rather than looking at someone's having a bad day at the office. Enough of a baseline to deem it a toxic work environment by a reasonable person, and that would actually give more protections to for everyone, but especially for women and people of color, who are disproportionately harmed by mistreatment at work.
Speaker 1:If this law passes, or this bill passes into law, people will be able to sue their employers and or their individual perpetrators, because right now, people who suffer from mistreatment at work will go to an employment lawyer and the employment lawyer will simply say I'm sorry, this is happening to you, but there's nothing under the law that will protect you in this.
Speaker 1:There's nothing to sue against. So we want to put that in place because it is such a prevalent tool that employers use against employees, often for speaking up about this behavior, and that's a huge piece that Vicky brought into. It is what's not just this workplace bullying phenomenon. It's that the employers at their level are ignoring these situations or retaliating against people because they want to avoid liability. So that's this and that's really the level where a lot of people feel betrayed by. We really focused, honed in on that aspect of it, because there's nobody holding the employers accountable for holding the bullies accountable. That's a major piece of the playbook that we thought was missing from not just other pieces of legislation, but from the messaging that really resonates with people to build this movement.
Speaker 2:We do have anti-discrimination, and then there's this act as well. Can you give an example of where the laws that are in place now aren't cutting it for people that are bullying? For example, if someone's getting bullied by their manager, is that not covered by anti-discrimination right now?
Speaker 1:It isn't, unless the person can prove that the reason for their mistreatment is because they're a member of a protected class, because they're of a certain race or because they're a woman or that sort of thing. The best example I can really give is if a bully is bullying everyone equally, then when everyone's suffering from harm, then there's really distinguished about even somebody in a protected class, about the way that they're being mistreated. I've heard people say, if you're like an equal opportunity jerk, like there's no legal recourse for that because the target's not being singled out because of their membership in a protected class.
Speaker 2:It's interesting because we see this a lot, especially sometimes at the executive level. People are a equal opportunity jerk and we get the well, that's just working with executives. That's just what this is. This is the type of behavior that they have and it's like no, this is actually not healthy at all and not constructive at all, and right now, there's no legal recourse for that.
Speaker 4:Yeah, because the norm, like you said, it's what people have just accepted nowadays that that's how people are going to act at that level.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we really want to implicate. You know people go to HR to report these situations often, but HR also often gets bullied because by the people they're reporting to. So this is really often a directive from the very top down, usually a culture issue, that there is that discriminatory impact on people who aren't in power typically. Basically.
Speaker 4:I'd just like to add to we were very intentional when we used the terminology psychological safety, because we were trying to go at it a different way, because passing the law is still not even our greatest obstacle. Raising public awareness is still our greatest obstacle. So when you say workplace bullying, no one knows what you mean by that. They don't know what you really mean by that. They conjure up whatever they want in their mind from their own experience, but they don't understand really that it's a process of dehumanization and it's a process of traumatization. So we were very intentional because, as I said, we have the two bars. We're trying to pass law, but we're also trying to raise public awareness and that still is almost in the forefront. But when we use the term psychological abuse and psychological safety, that has resonated with people. Now everyone knows what we're talking about. Everyone understands what that is. It's taken off.
Speaker 3:That's a great segue into my next question. Vicki, on the website I noticed you talk about an abuser playbook. What does it look like?
Speaker 1:I think too, in terms of the playbook, what we're seeing is a lot of high performers affected by this. They pose a threat to someone in power who wants to reinforce their own power and control. Performer is weakened is very typical tactics for abuse, like false accusations, sabotage, verbal abuse. We see outright lies in performance reviews. We see withholding information from people, overloading unreasonably heavy workloads all sorts of different tactics that are designed by people in power because that power differential is so important to weaken their target, to dim their flame, basically. And so when the person starts to catch on and starts to feel devalued, a lot of times they internalize what's happening to them and so they end up subscribing to the narrative until they really catch on that these things are happening. They start to notice that they're feeling so devalued and demeaned all the time, and then when they finally go to report it to a higher up or HR, depending on who the perpetrator is if they go to their own boss or if the perpetrator is their boss that's when that sort of second level of betrayal can kick in and they realize the process just gets dragged out. You think that the company is going to care that there's some form of mistreatment happening and that it's in the way of their bottom line. But really oftentimes we see investigations never happening or they're inadequate investigations and then people try legal recourse and realize that the whole society isn't on their side because there's no law against this behavior which basically tells them the harm done to them is okay. It just adds layer upon layer of betrayal. It can be really hard. A lot of these ways of harming people can be done behind closed doors. It can be done through gossip and sabotage that people don't have any ideas happening until months, weeks or months later. So it can be really hard to see.
Speaker 1:A lot of times, just sensing that the perpetrator has these power and control issues and that they're trying to reinforce that at every turn, instead of what I think of as a healthy relationship with a boss is like trying to flatten that hierarchy as much as possible and being a support and trying to figure out what their subordinates need.
Speaker 1:There is that heavy layer of power and control with this. So I think when people start to see that for what it is and realize I know in my situation, when I saw that happening, my response was internalizing it and thinking well, I have to try harder then. And that really was the opposite of what going to help me, because that threatened the bully more. The abuse ramped up and had I been able to catch it more quickly, I think I would have been able to detach from it more easily and just say, okay, may have still gone to HR, may have still gone to the head doing the right thing, but the typical response is avoiding liability. That education piece is huge as to what is likely to happen, given the power structures and the system that the people in power have designed to maintain their own power.
Speaker 3:So how can employees, or even employers, recognize that abuse is happening in the workplace? What do they need to look out for?
Speaker 1:So when we just define even just basic psychological abuse, we're talking about a violation of an employee's inherent basic right to dignity. So this is severe or pervasive infliction of toxic or unethical words and or actions, whether they're intentional or unintentional, direct or indirect. These can also be omissions. They're directed in terms of creating the toxic work environment Bullying we call it employee to employee interpersonal abuse.
Speaker 4:As Deb said, that was a big part of what we went after in the playbook and in the legislation was holding the employer accountable, and we use the word mobbing and what we mean by that is organizational bullying, so it's more the employer, it's representative employees to the employee. I've since learned, thanks to Jen Fraser who wrote the Bully Brain, another word and I use it more often now, and it's institutional complicity. That's good. Now that is clearer than mobbing. So we're learning as we go and I'm trying to use that terminology.
Speaker 1:And then we see sabotage as a type of bullying. There's all sorts of different ways to even define bullying, but also to categorize types of bullying. But sabotage we've bucketed into things that are types of exclusion, so things like excluded from meetings and conversations that you should be involved with. This could be timely access to resources, information that you need to do your job, assignment of work. We've seen situations where people are not given information that they need to do work they've been assigned to, and then they get reprimanded for not completing the work, so they're basically being set up to fail. Unfairness falls into this. We talk about gaslighting, which is where the narrative gets twisted, so you believe you were made to be the problem. I'll call this crazy making too, where this can be micromanaging and inconsistent complying with rules. It could be a demotion or threatening of job loss without any cause. Inaccurate performance reviews that's a big one, especially when new management comes in and they want to hire their own people. They'll just start a paper trail, but it won't be accurate in order to push out the employee. It could be discounting work, taking credit for work, blocking requests for needed training or leave, increasing responsibilities without giving authority to complete the responsibilities, removing responsibilities with no explanation, unreasonably heavy workloads, underwork, consistently to the point where somebody feels useless, so they're not doing what they were promised would be they would be doing in that role. Unrealistic deadlines We've heard a lot of stories about people essentially like being set up to fail where they're given these ridiculously unrealistic deadlines that they can't meet. Favoritism is involved with this, where a lot of people have this separate set of rules because they're not in the in crowd. Vague reviews, accusations without any backup. We've heard of people having their equipment tampered with, their personal belongings tampered with, and then the last part of this is lack of clarity. So it can be really vague directions, deception around work, expectations, deadlines, reprimands without any ways to improve. Again, this isn't a bad day at the office. This is like the norm of how expectations are set and sort of thing. Like vicky said too.
Speaker 1:When it comes to the bullying and the mobbing, the, a lot of people talk about mobbing as like group bullying essentially, and that can be part of the playbook too, where it starts with one-on-one person in power, person, a lesser role, and then that person in power creates this false narrative behind the scenes and gets other people to join into that false narrative, then a lot of times people side with that power out of fear of losing their own job.
Speaker 1:And then, gradually too, the target can just feel so isolated, have no idea what's going on behind the scenes, but they're characterized in a way that they have no idea about and it's completely opposite of how they feel, believe that they're performing, or at least were performing, and then that's when that mobbing piece, as we're defining it with the institutional complicity it often escalates to that, because people feel trapped. They have no idea what to do, where to go, who will help them. And so when HR is training on anti-discrimination law and encouraging reports of mistreatment, they believe that going to HR will be the solution. But oftentimes HR will just be looking to see if there's any sort of valid complaint, if there's a legal liability, and they'll do some sort of risk assessment and decide should we just push this person out and avoid the liability? How much of a risk does this person pose?
Speaker 2:Which is one of the reasons why you need a law like this right, because HR is going to go to the law, they're going to go to A what is legal, and then what's the liability for the organization, which is why you need this as a law, because if it's not, it's very gray. It can be very gray for HR. I have a question, though, about the bobbing piece, which is does it have to be, or even the bullying, or even the sabotage, does it have to be somebody in power?
Speaker 1:Because I've seen this peer to peer, I've seen this as team members doing it to their leader. It can be lateral bullying and it can be upward bullying too. I think the most common is that downward bullying, but it can happen from any direction. I've heard of situations in all of those ways and to your point earlier too, I was going to say we have heard HR people say we need a tool, a law, to be able to hold these bullies accountable. So I think it will benefit HR to have this tool to actually do something about the bullying.
Speaker 4:Their profession has really been called out this phenomenon, because the statistics say that at least 71% of our businesses don't do the right thing when this happens. So there's a lot of people out there who are either uncomfortable doing what they're told to do or there's lots of people out there who have left HR because they won't do that. It's sad because they're the flying monkeys of this. They're the ones who come out and make it happen. We pull back the layer even further than HR. We point to the legal department, whoever that legal head is. They are and this is funny, francesca, because you're saying they want a law, but really what they're doing is skirting the law by doing this. I've talked about this even if this law is passed, it's going to be like whack-a-mole with them, like they're going to pop up and try to do something else, because that's the way the legal departments function. Culture and operationalize HR will need to fundamentally shift.
Speaker 2:There's so much culture change that will need to happen in organizations for organizations to be healthy enough for not having this happen. And I think back to like when anti-sexual harassment rolled out. I mean, sitting in our seats right now. No way in hell would you ever think that telling your administrative assistant that they have a nice ass is okay. That was okay 20 years ago, quite honestly. And now it's not. And we're still in this realm right now with bullying, with sabotage, with mobbingbing, where this stuff is still culturally, in a lot of places, tolerated. Okay, organizations are complicit.
Speaker 1:I'm excited by this and then I also think it is a massive sea change, very similar to what sexual harassment was yeah, in fact, we try to model the bill on sexual harassment law, saying that like it's the work environment, like that hostile they're. They call it a hostile work environment, we're calling it toxic. It's the baseline and people don't need to prove psychological injury. But yeah, it is. It is going to be gradually this huge shift for employers and their work cultures.
Speaker 2:I'm curious about with what you both are working on. Obviously you've done a tremendous amount to push this forward. What are some of the priority hot button issues that you're working on within the next three months? What's hot for you right now?
Speaker 1:I mean, one of the biggest things is a Rhode Island the bill in Rhode Island. So we have two active bills, one in Massachusetts and one in Rhode Island, and we have just a couple more months in the session in Rhode Island. It just passed the Senate Labor Committee, it's on to a vote in the Senate floor, it'll move to the House Labor Committee and we're mobilizing people getting the message out there to take action, to write the house labor committee. So that's our biggest priority. We're still in the early days of even having formed our national teams and our teams of bill directors. We have about 20 new states that are working on getting legislation introduced in 2025. We're going to do another training to get more people on board. It's super energizing. Just the educational piece alone of this is huge and just the creativity coming out, the connections and coalition building people are doing.
Speaker 4:If this passes in Rhode Island, this would be our first win of a law. We just have to have that under our belt. I can't tell you how many other legislators we've watched hearings around the country, and the first thing that the chairs ask is has this passed anyplace else? So we can't wait to say yes.
Speaker 1:I want to ask, not if but when this gets passed in Rhode Island and when momentum picks up, what will employees be able to do? The big thing is to sue their employer for mistreatment that meets that baseline standard. Right now they don't have the ability to do that. It's not going to be this wave of the magic wand, like we've seen. Obviously, sexual harassment is still really prevalent, despite there being a lot against it. But the other piece is this is really about prevention. So the bill actually has a lot of language around what the employer can do to minimize their own liability from training and having a policy, which we know doesn't work in and of itself, but that as a start, in terms of trying to prevent this behavior, to having thorough investigations and then, when they do find that there was bullying happening, coaching, counseling, discipline. We want there to be an adequate addressing of this issue from start to finish, from educating and monitoring the work environment to actually holding bullies accountable.
Speaker 3:You talk a lot about what organizations can do in terms of prevention, but what can team leaders do today? What can just teammates do today to help with that prevention in the workplace or be advocates for others if they're not the victim of it, but see it happening? What can they be doing?
Speaker 1:It's a really tough situation for bystanders to be in because pretty much stuck between siding with the abuser and siding with the target, and if that abuser is their boss, then putting themselves in a situation to have to be the next target. Basically, we encourage people to speak out, but we know that there's risk, a lot of risk, in doing that. So I think even just telling the target, even private I saw this happen to you. I like to validate it for them and knowledge that they were harmed and that they're a human being and harm wasn't okay To just be there for set goals, help people understand that the vision and mission and the goals of their unit, even if there's a lot of toxic behavior coming down from the top.
Speaker 1:What's a tough position for a manager to be in dealing with that and trying to change the culture of their own department. But I think that's the power that they have. How do you treat people as workers, as though they're adults and that they can control their jobs and that they have social support? And I think everything that we're supporting, including the Workplace Psychological Safety Act, just all goes back to that, in that if managers treat their subordinates like people, then not only will they be healthier, but their bottom lines will actually increase. I think the bottom line is just bringing the humanity back to the workplace, or to the workplace in the first place.
Speaker 3:This has been just really wonderful and appreciate all of the tips and insights.
Speaker 4:I just want to say thank you for this space because this is raising public awareness. So every time that this gets put out there on a podcast, or someone reposts the social media or wants to submit written testimony, it all counts.
Speaker 1:One of the biggest parts of this work is that we're giving people hope who are otherwise feeling so trapped in what they're experiencing. It's important for people to know there is hope out there. We're both living proof that there is happiness on the other side of all of this and, with support and taking their own voices back, they can get there too, and collectively, no matter what happens. If we're speaking out together, then we're taking a stand for ourselves, and I think that's huge.
Speaker 3:Love it Well. Thank you both so much for being here with us today. Appreciate you, Thank you.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much for joining us today. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. You can come over and say hi to us on the TikToks and LinkedIn community. Hit us up at yourworkfriendscom. We're always posting stuff on there and if you found this episode helpful, share with your work friends, Thanks Brad.