Why employees fear reporting workplace harassment issues

Achieving a healthy workplace requires moving beyond simple legal compliance and toward active cultural transformation and the cultivation of genuine relational trust.

On a recent episode of The HR Leader Podcast, HR Leader managing editor Jerome Doraisamy spoke with EMA Consulting principal consultant, Ming-Lyn Hii, about her work in implementing lawful and reasonable management action plans, the importance of ensuring more constructive interactions between managers and their teams, the drivers of such negative interactions, and what constitutes reasonable conduct.

An expert in employee relations with a broad skill set spanning workplace investigations, contracts, and enterprise agreements, Hii has over a decade of experience in human resources.

In the episode, Hii challenged HR professionals to look beyond the static boundaries of legal compliance, advocating for a shift toward active cultural transformation.

Framing the foundation of management action within the boundary between performance management and harm, Hii noted that leaders needed a clear vision of what lawful action looked like in practice.

"A big part of my work involves helping leaders understand the difference between lawful, reasonable management action that could cause harm or cross the line,” she said.

Further to this, she also said that effective management systems depended on prevention rather than reaction, particularly where risk of harm existed, stressing that compliance requires prevention.

Hii consistently linked constructive workplace outcomes to the quality of relationships between leaders and staff, arguing that legal compliance alone was insufficient without relational trust.

This extended into the importance of psychosocial safety and upward communication.

The conversation had reinforced that when employees did not feel safe to speak up, early warning systems failed, even where formal processes existed.

As such, she referenced broader evidence showing that "over 80% of people who'd experienced harassment in their life didn't make a formal report.”

This can be attributed to concerns about trust, confidentiality, and an overarching sense of fear, which underscored the importance of constructive managerial-to-employee interactions for surfacing issues early.

Regarding negative interactions in the workplace, one of the key drivers she had identified was a lack of relational awareness, particularly where leaders misread how their behaviour was received, which she described as: a lack of awareness of how someone else experiences an individual's behaviour.

When it came to systemic and behavioural contributors, including failure to intervene early and the absence of psychosocial safety, Hii noted that leaders often did not act before issues escalated.

In addition, she referenced research showing why employees did not raise concerns, including fear of “negative consequences, no confidence in the complaint handling process, or they have concerns about confidentiality.”

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