In my practice, I see a lot of trends where the quantity of certain behaviors or issues seem to run in cycles.

Lately, I’ve seen a lot of “creep” & “jerk” issues arise in businesses.  This happens when a business has a very difficult employee who behaves like a creep & a jerk, yet their conduct might not be illegal.  Most of the time, the offender is a man, but in a minority of cases, women are guilty too.

The behaviors these people exhibit are pretty obvious to everyone but themselves & those closest to them.  They leer & stare, they make ambiguous sounds at co-workers like whistles & grunts, they stand too close to or deliberately get in the way of co-workers, & they’re generally unpleasant to be around.  Also, their conduct isn’t secretive.  In fact, most people know who the offenders are via the grapevine, if not from personal experience.

The general consensus among my clients & me is that these employees are immature & oblivious to their behavior.  They seem to have no concern for what their co-workers think of them.  I won’t go deeper into analysis lest we venture into the “regarded as” area of disability law.

However, many of my clients seem to have difficulty confronting the offender.  Sometimes the difficulties are due to the offender being a great performer (except for their behavior), & because they’re not doing anything illegal, the behavior is tolerable on an intermittent basis.  Alternatively, the claims never get beyond the grapevine because the victims are afraid to talk about the offender, for fear of retaliation or just not knowing what to do.

One of the tactics I’ve been using is to publicly “out” the offender, & even open up discussion of these issues to the broader workforce; i.e., increased transparency in dealing with these issues.  Essentially, we convene an all-staff meeting & openly discuss the offensive behavior.  In some instances, the offender might even be present.  In fact, I haven’t actually done this yet, but I’ve spoken with clients about doing role playing & including the offender in this exercise.  The basic idea is to increase transparency by directly calling the behavior to the offender’s attention & using their response as an indicator of their ability to improve.  If nothing else has had an impact on the offender, & there’s still a belief that the offender can be rehabilitated, then talking about their behavior in front of others might work.

I’ve found that by increasing & broadening discussion of the behavior of these creeps & jerks there seems to be fewer incidents of bad behavior, & it’s easier to hold the offender accountable, because it’s not some dirty little secret, & it shows that management isn’t afraid to openly confront & deal with this behavior.  The offender also has the chance to see the impact of their behavior on those they work closest with.  If the offender truly understands what’s going on, it makes remediation simpler.  If they have no clue, you’ll see denial & rationalization, & you’ll know that they can’t improve.  It also makes it easier to fire the offender because you can just tell them that employees find them creepy or a jerk.  No one wants to work with creeps & jerks, unless they’re explicitly paid to do so.  But, these types of tactics shouldn’t be used by novices (don’t try this at home  ).  It takes someone with confidence, savvy & great communication skills to successfully engage employees in this context.