Culture Creation at Your Organization
Harassment and threats targeting individuals are usually under-reported because they’re usually framed as a personal problem. Similarly, organizations for which some volume of “hate mail” is normal may disregard escalations of quantity or content even when those escalations may signal a new or increased risk.
To assess the scope of the problem at your organization, it’s necessary to cultivate a culture of communication and care around the prevention of and response to these incidents. When the leadership has decided to take responsibility for protecting of the team against these threats, that decision has to be communicated clearly with messaging and with actions.
Without clearly communicating this priority, and backing it up with actions and resources, workers won’t feel safe enough to come forward when they are subject to harassment and threat.
A first step can be to survey your team to try to understand what volume and type of harassment they are currently experiencing or have experienced, and what impact it has had on them. PENAmerica has made a sample survey of this type.
Keeping open lines of communication with your team about what they’re experiencing, what they’re witnessing, and what they need will plant the seeds of a culture where all your organization’s members feel confident that they are not alone in their experiences of harassment, threats, and violence, and are resourced in responding to those experiences.
These tools can only be effectively implemented in a carefully cultivated global culture of trust within the organization. When marginalized members have an experience-driven belief that their concerns will be heard and addressed, and that their holistic well-being matters to the people they work with and for, it will build the foundation for the robust intra-organizational communication necessary for operational and informational security.
Creating a culture of security at any organization requires creating a culture of trust. Therefore, it is organizational self-defense to invest in trust-building organizational practices, such as healing and transformative justice models and safe feedback mechanisms for front-line staff, organizers, and other externally-facing representatives of the community.
None of this work occurs in a vacuum, and your people know what they need.
