Lee Walton

Behavox rounded off the month of May with a webinar alongside The Economist – Stemming the tide: addressing toxic work culture to retain and attract talent. In this webinar we examined how businesses can tackle workplace misconduct to create a culture of safety and support for their employees.

In case you missed it and want to jump into the webinar right now, here it is on demand!

Our Chief Customer Intelligence Officer, Fahreen Kurji, joined other industry leaders for a lively hour-long discussion on how technology and AI can head off a toxic work culture in a proactive, rather than reactive way as the utility of traditional reactive measures has long been in question.

Moderating the panel was Sarah Repucci, America’s Regional Lead for Policy and Insights, she was joined by Fahreen and 3 other panellists:

  • Angus Macgregor, Head of Global Human Resources at MUFG Bank.
  • Amy Hanlon-Rodemich, Chief People Officer at Hitachi.
  • Catherine Mattic, Founder of Civility Partners.

Workplace misconduct us not new. Vaultplatforms 2021 report: The Trust Gap, reported that 75% of office workers in the U.S. have experienced or witnessed some kind of workplace misconduct. Misconduct can mean significant financial losses and reputation all damage for businesses. In addition, with more work being done remotely, we’re grappling with some new challenges. There’s less visibility, which can shield abusers. Some covid related restrictions have actually opened space for bullying, harassment and discrimination. And unfortunately there is still a stigma attached to reporting misconduct. A lot more needs to be done to address misconduct.

Sarah Repucci, Lead of America’s Policy and Insights Team @The Economist

Topics of discussion ranged from:

  • Challenges in ensuring appropriate conduct in the modern workplace (office, remote & hybrid).
  • The role technology plays in promoting and ensuring appropriate conduct and retaining top talent.
  • How are the conditions that enable misconduct changing? And to what extent can businesses be proactive with their measures, instead of reactive?
  • Whether there is a lack of awareness about misconduct among bosses and employees?

High-profile cases of harassment have helped draw the attention of the wider world to this critical issue, but one reason that many cases of misconduct never see the light of day is that unfortunately, there is still a stigma that comes with reporting misconduct. 

Solutions to a hesitancy to report range from managing stress levels, whistleblower hotlines, a pulse survey in order to connect with people who aren’t inclined to speak out and more. The creation of different channels aims to provide an avenue for everyone to be able to feel comfortable speaking up when necessary, but as we’ll see in this next quote, the stats show that traditional methods are certainly not fool proof.

On the role that technology plays in ensuring workplace conduct and retaining top talent, Fahreen had this to say:

HR and ethics teams have no option but to rely on self reporting, but in the survey that we conducted, we found that only 14% of employees report, and only 5% would use mechanisms such as an employee hotline. So even though these tools are great, they’re not proactive, surveys, surveys aren’t necessarily actionable because once you get to it, it’s too late. That’s where AI and technology comes into play, you can survey international communications across emails, texts, voice messages, and both traditional and non traditional forms of communication to alert HR teams to serious forms of misconduct such as bullying, sexual harassment or discrimination in real time, so technology is integral, AI and machine learning can allow you to trigger an alert proactively, allowing visibility into misconduct right now, rather than what happened previously.

Fahreen Kurji, Chief Customer Intelligence Officer @Behavox

A recurring theme throughout the webinar was the limited effectiveness of traditional methods of ensuring workplace conduct, the reactive nature of traditional methods means that you’re always playing catchup so to speak, the misconduct has already taken place. This is where Behavox AI solution comes in, the ability to track and address misconduct as in real time provides vital time to both extinguish misconduct and mitigate the fallout.

If you’re interested to see how the Behavox solution can help you, click here.

AI and machine learning tech has the capacity to review millions of communications, such as email, IM, voice messaging, and video, it is the only feasible way to have complete, comprehensive coverage of a company’s data – its digital headquarters. This is especially true with regards to voice data, the previous method of random sampling, by the very nature of sampling, allows the vast majority of data to slip through the cracks *neigh chasm*.

Behavox uses AI and machine learning technology to identify illegal, immoral and malicious behavior. In recent times there has been a shift from merely focusing on the illegal aspect of behavior, to encompassing the immoral and malicious behavior in tandem.

It’s too late to join the live session, but you can watch the recording on demand here. For more information on what’s coming up, check out our events page.