A report into sexual harassment in the Western Australia mining industry highlights the corrosive nature of corporate life in a stark way. If women were being bothered by unwanted advances, if the comments coming from their male coworkers were so awkward, if they felt like they had to wear baggy clothing just to survive the workplace, where were the human resources departments?
What were HR managers doing? Did they have no idea? Were no complaints at all about fly-in-fly-out employees on mine sites registered in their books? It’s very hard to believe that some idea of the problem wasn’t talked about among HR staff. What about sharing this data with colleagues at other companies? If you have dedicated HR staff whose job it is to find out about misbehaviour in the workplace and to deal with it in a professional manner, then the system evidently failed in a catastrophic manner.
A public outcry, an official government report, all of these things must lead to culture change, but I think the problem with mining industry HR management reflects the corrosive nature of the corporation itself because here HR departments are only designed to take information from the top and use it to control the lives of lower-ranking employees.
Flows of knowledge the other way just don’t happen. Corporations are designed to serve customer interests. One executive at a company I worked at, when I talked to him one-on-one about work said that the customer is always right, or words to that effect. If this is your touchstone for relevance – how each employee’s time is spent during the days that they are employed on company business – then you need a type of fascism to drive growth and profitability, a type of top-down control of individuals’ lives (because people spend so much of their lives at work). You need to prioritise what customers want instead of what line employees think is the best way to do business. If you do this it means shrinking the amount of freedom that people have inside the company, because to a lesser or greater degree you’re telling them what to do.
In order to do this, HR departments have to be on the job too. This means listening to management and using that learning to craft statements aimed at limiting the freedom that employees further down the pecking order have. In this context, it’s not surprising that women’s voices in the WA mining scandal didn’t get heard.
So a full rethink of the corporation is needed to fix the problem. If you want to have employees’ rightful complaints listened to by management you have to change the paradigm, redesign the role of HR, and get used to messages – of all types – coming up the chain from the shop floor to mahogany row.
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