 Hey, hello, everybody. Welcome to the Think Tech Hawaii studios for another episode of security matters. I hope you're all doing well out there today. I'm glad to be in here sharing some more valuable information with you today. I have an amazing guest. Sejal Thacker is a subject matter expert. I believe legal training ninja. Her background is illegal and I'll let her share that with you. But her passion is civility and respect in the workplace. And she's got some amazing things to share with you today. Sejal, thanks so much for joining me today. I know you're busy. We're all busy these days. Thank you so much, Andrew. This is so awesome. Thanks for having me. No, thank you. We're going to get our money's worth today. So I typically let my guests to kind of share their background and their history and I read yours, but share with our guests who may not be as familiar with sort of this line of work and your background and then your passion for how you got into it and then of course train extra, which is what you've been doing sort of full time these days. Sure. I'd love to. So just by way of quick history, I'm an employment lawyer. I've been litigating cases, primarily representing management since about 2003. And I've worked on all kinds of cases, but just sort of ended up happening that I dealt a lot with sexual harassment, workplace bullying and discrimination cases. And I've seen all kinds of stuff happening in the workplace. From insensitive comments to sexual harassment, physical touching cases. I mean, just when I feel like I've seen it all, another case sort of drops on my desk. And what I often found happening as an attorney was rather than actually litigating the case, I was helping people kind of understand what their rights were. And this was whether I was dealing with a supervisor or an employee. And it became really obvious that, you know, a lot of us, I mean, we spend a lot of time at work and we sometimes more than we do with our own families. And so I say that all the time because we really kind of take that for granted. And, and I've seen employers who are well intentioned and employees who are well intentioned and they get themselves in these situations and really, you know, just don't know what to do. So one of the reasons why I stopped litigating cases and started doing training. And then recently, a couple of years ago, I started up my own company, a proactive training company, because I really believe that we have to kind of address it differently than the way that we've been doing it. What we've been doing hasn't really worked. We've been putting bandages on things rather than kind of addressing the root cause. So my whole mission right now, and I'm, you know, I would love to share with the people that are watching and listening to this is really just what I believe is the way that we can kind of reduce harassment and these kind of predatory behaviors from happening in the workplace. So that's kind of what I'm doing right now. I mean, let's, good. Yeah, let's, let's get into it. So let's, let's go, let's go with a big term and you don't see a lot of civility. This is a one of those sort of basic, what would I get it just a basic behavioral characteristic that you sort of expect out of people in a public space like like your workspace. Let's talk about where, where you've seen it come from maybe, maybe some ideas for how it's eroded. I see a lot of what I call uncivil behavior out there just in the public space. Sure. So, you know, when I stopped litigating cases and that was about seven years ago, I pulled out all my cases that I'd worked on over the years. And I started taking a look at why did we end up in court in these cases and a couple of things like really jumped out at me. One was that there was some breakdown in the communication, whether there was no communication lack of communication, miscommunication, misunderstanding, something that had to do with communication. And then the other thing I found was that there was a lot of in in civility going on in the workplace, and that people saw it happening, but then they didn't address it properly, or they didn't know what to do about it. So a lot of times they didn't say anything, you know, because they feared that they'd be retaliated against or sometimes they believe that no one would believe them, or they just weren't sure what their rights were. I mean, there's over 100 different reasons why people don't speak up when they feel that someone's being treating them, you know, badly. And so, so those were kind of the things that really jumped out at me. And then when I looked at the numbers by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and they were they were saying that, you know, nationwide we were seeing discrimination and harassment complaints and retaliation complaints over over 76,000 complaints in 2018. And last year there was, you know, 73,000 complaints. So when I looked at this, I'm like, this is something needs to happen here. We're not we're not addressing this the right way. We, you know, and then I saw a lot of diversity and inclusion stuff going on. And so you were seeing organizations saying that they were committed to diversity and inclusion, and they were hiring, you know, their chief diversity officer chief inclusion officer, and yet the complaints weren't going down. And so what I Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2016, they did a task force study, and they came out with this massive I think it's like over 100 page report, where they basically said, what we've been doing with harassment training in the workspace hasn't worked. And they really outlined all these different reasons why it wasn't working. And then at the very end of it, they say that what really needs to happen is we need to start focusing in on creating more work spaces that are respectful and focused on civil behavior, as well as increasing bystander intervention trainings. And so that was sort of the reason why I started doing what I'm doing right now is because I completely understand, you know, you can, if you can't assume that when everybody comes into an organization that they're all going to know what's appropriate for the workplace and what's not. I think that we need to think that everybody knows how to behave. So, so I think organizations, the pitch that I've been making is to organizations is look, you need to hire a chief civility officer so that's what I call myself right I'm the chief civility officer of train extra, along with legal training ninjas. So, and my thing is we need to unique your organization has to create civility as a core strategic value, in addition to diversity and inclusion, and the other values, but civility has to be a core value. You need to hire a chief civility officer, you need to put the resources, put the processes the policies all of them in place and teach people what you mean by civility and then communicate that set up civility systems and so forth. And so, so one of the definitions and, you know, is what is civility, because if we go we ask 100 different people what they mean by civility, everybody's going to tell us. So the definition that I like, and it's by a doctor her name is Cynthia Clark, she's the leading expert in the civility sort of workplace issues. And I pulled it out here because I wanted to definitely share this with you is this is what I use in my workshops and this is what I use during my trainings and I obviously break it down but she calls workplace civility is an authentic respect for others, requiring time presence, a willingness to engage in genuine discourse and an intention to seek common ground. And so then we can break those down if you wanted to but that's sort of the definition and I love the way she explains it and she talks about it. And she wrote this book called civility matters, which is a great book for anybody that's interested on this area, but so but an organization every organization is different. And they would have to come up with their own definition but this is just one that I love the elements and how it breaks it out. Do you so I love I love intentionality because I think that's a thing that's that's lacking often. I am especially in the workplace where everybody seems hurried like they're they got to get something done and it's like oh let's let's have this transactional conversation where I get what I need or I give you whatever, you know, I'm trying to get the monkey off my back onto your back whatever it may be, but it's it's transactional without an intention of maybe understanding why I need this monkey off my back or why you may need to get something from me. And that we don't we're not taught to engage in conversation with intentionality, at least very well I don't think many people are familiar with that idea. When you come across that element in your training sessions is that do you have to take some time there with most people to get them to think about their intention in a conversation. Absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, we it's got to be scenario based and I do a lot of storytelling and I talk about the cases that I've worked on. And that really seems to resonate and one of the things that I really keep tying trying tying this back to is. And I think this is what works in empowering everybody to be a part of the solution because I never really I never really understood it. I thought it was ridiculous that, you know, up until last year, we were only requiring that supervisors get trained on sexual harassment. I'm like, why? How does this make sense? Right? It's not like the supervisor are the only one harassing people and it's not only sexual harassment. It could be any kind of harassment based on any reason, right? And so it just the system that wasn't set up to really get to the root cause. But the way that we talk about intentionality and how I get people to kind of really feel like they can do something about it. Because a lot of times people actually feel like they're out of control. They don't have control over the situation. And so they don't want to get involved, right? And the way that I kind of talk about it is, look, rarely is it a situation where you're going to have somebody that's going to just engage in harassing conduct like out of the blue, right? It's usually something where you start seeing this kind of progression happen. Like first they're going to be rude or they might make an insensitive joke or they might be a little dismissive and then they're going to see. Does anybody do anything about it? And if they don't, then they'll continue, right? And then if it continues, then it gets to the point where it might become unwelcome or dismissive behavior or abusive conduct bullying. And then pretty soon it's illegal harassment or discrimination. So I kind of talk about it as a progression of behaviors. And then I tell people, but look, let's say they're not even intending to harass you or make you feel uncomfortable. They make a joke. But for whatever reason, that's offensive to me because of my culture. And maybe Andrew thinks it's hilarious, you know, and I don't. And that's just because of our limited life experiences and the lens by which we view our world. But if I don't say something to you or to that person, you're going to keep thinking it's okay and you're going to keep doing it. But it might not be an intentional thing, but until I put you on notice. And so this is where I tell people that they have to start speaking up. They have to put people on notice, even if it's not intentional because that person's until you put that person on notice, they're going to keep doing it. Because I can't tell you the number of cases I've worked on where, you know, I'm talking to a supervisor or even if it's not a supervisor, anybody that's accused of doing something wrong. And then, you know, right away, they'll be like, well, I never do that. Had I known that I would have stopped and I agree. I think most people, if you tell them, hey, knock it off, that's making me feel uncomfortable. They're pretty much going to stop. Right. We're not going to work to make people feel uncomfortable. But until now, most organizations have made it hard for anyone to even speak up. Right. Look at the retaliation complaints. Interesting. I mean, you're talking about, we're going to, we're sure we're going to take a short break. And I want to come back to civility and see if it's got that, you know, civil having that broader aspect of other people waiting in when they see someone doing something. So we'll, we'll take a break. We'll pay some bills and we'll be back in about one minute with Seja Thacker. Aloha. I'm John David and the host of History Lens on Think Tech, Hawaii. History Lens deals with contemporary events and looks at them through a historical perspective or what we call a history lens. The show is streamed live on ThinkTech, Hawaii.com. Thanks so much for watching our show. We look forward to seeing you then. Mahalo and Aloha. Hey, welcome back. We're talking with Seja Thacker and we were talking about civility in the worst place. And I wanted to broaden that a little bit and talk, you know, when civil is like, to me, you've got this, this community aspect to it. Sounds sort of governmental, but it's the community. And so, you know, when we're talking about civil behavior and Seja was talking about, you know, I may tell a joke. It's offensive because I think it's funny, but I'm not aware that someone else is sensitive to that. And so they can let me know and that can help me to resolve that as you understand that that's offensive to someone. But what if the third party, what if your fellow workers see stuff happening or overhear stuff that they find offensive? It wasn't even directed at them. They need to step in too. And, you know, we need to be sensitive to each other's sensitivities for lack of a better word in the workplace. So have you seen a lot of that awareness changing for people? Do they pitch in and try to help their fellow worker out? Because, you know, as you were talking, they don't even speak up for themselves very often. So, you know, it's like, wow, am I going to speak up for the other guy, you know? Yeah. Well, and this is exactly where the organization has to be a critical component to this whole thing. They have to create an environment where people feel comfortable voicing their concerns, right? Not waiting. I mean, I love it when I'm talking to some CEO or something. And then they'll be like, we don't have any problems here. Nobody is complaining. And I'm like, okay, all right. That is not necessarily always the case. But have you done any surveys? Do you have any data to support that fact? Or are you just assuming that because nobody is complaining that you have an awesome work environment? Right. And so oftentimes they make the inaccurate assumption. But also, I think that as more organizations get educated on this and really see the business case behind why it makes sense to encourage employees to raise these concerns and complaints and be more proactive rather than reactive. Because if you wait till it's too late, it's too, you know, the culture of the organization is not going to revive a lot of times after the lawsuits filed and plenty of research behind that issue. And not only that, but then, you know, these days are, I mean, we have to take into account that it's hard enough to get a new employee that's qualified to do the job in the door. And then you train them, you spend all this money on getting them up to speed. The last thing you want is them for them to walk out the door and go across the street to your competitor and use that experience, which is what's happening now, right? I mean, that whole thing about looking at resumes and looking for gaps, nobody cares about that anymore. So you have to care about your culture in a proactive way. The other piece of it too that I think we have to talk about is this whole unconscious bias situation because a lot of the training that, you know, one piece of what I do is civility stuff. But then there's this whole other side of the coin that I don't think organizations are addressing and you can't get to civility or diversity or even inclusion until you address this unconscious bias. And I, you know, some people get offended when I use the word bias. And so I always say this at every, every single time I talk about it, that sometimes I'll call it unconscious belief because we're all human beings, we all have it. And so, but there's not good information that employees are, that organizations are sharing with their employees on unconscious bias. And so we can't talk about intentional behaviors without addressing the unconscious or the implicit bias type of behaviors that we all have. And so that's been another piece of what I think has been missing and why we haven't been able to really make a dent in this harassment issue is because people don't understand unconscious bias. So let me give you an example. And I use this when I do my public, my presentation, it's really effective is, you know, I had a case that I worked on years ago where it was a manager that was had a team of eight people, and they hired a new female employee. And so there were other females, so it was an agenda discrimination or harassment complaint. But what ended up happening would be there would be situations and what she complained about was that during the meetings, the supervisor would kind of go around and ask everybody how was your day or what are you up to what's the status on that. And then the employees would give their responses and for whatever reason, whenever he would get to her, he would either skip over her altogether. He would interrupt her when she would be speaking. He has maybe his tone would slightly change. Right. And he was kind of dismissive. And so, you know, anybody in that situation, any one of us would be, hello, this is, we start thinking about why is this person treating me this way. And so that happened, right. And so when I got involved, I was called in to investigate this case. And so when I met with her, there wasn't any clear protected category. And frankly, there were other women there. There wasn't and nobody ever complained about the supervisor before he had a really good track record. I had no reason to doubt his credibility. There wasn't anything, you know, so we were trying to figure out what was going on. And then I met with him after I met with her, I met with him. And within literally, I would say, 20 minutes, it became obvious that it was an unconscious bias issue. And what I, because unconscious bias is unconscious to us, right. But mostly it comes out in our actions or body language to everybody else. So we just don't see it. So it wasn't that hard to figure it out. And what I learned was that when he was around eight or nine years old, he was obese. It's a significantly overweight where the doctors had basically said, if you don't lose this weight, you're done in six months. Like you're not going to be around, right? So imagine being a child and being told that you can imagine the harassment, the bullying, the comments that he's heard about how he had to lose the way and how he was weak. And how, you know, all of this stuff ingrained into his hardwiring, which is what unconscious bias is, right? It's beliefs, opinions and things that are ingrained into our brains before we even know it. Most of the time we don't even know what's there until it comes out as a spontaneous judgment. So he had heard that he was weak so often while this woman was a few pounds overweight. So whenever he would look at her unconsciously, he views it as being weak, right? And so we were able to figure this out and resolve it. Those two still work together. They have an amazing relationship. But how many people are going to be able to pick that up? Most people are going to be like, that's discrimination or that's harassment or that's bullying behavior. And there's this whole other side of it that if we're trained on it and we start with ourselves, right? And we start becoming aware of our own biases. Then we can make sure it's not interfering with our interactions with other people or the decisions we're making at work. So this is a huge piece of the puzzle that's missing from those organizations. And especially for HR and legal. I mean, I think everybody should be trained on it, frankly, because every person individually has to do the work on this. And it's not a one-time thing. It's not like you're going to sit down and say, all right, I'm going to take this online tool, which you can take, which I recommend. Everybody does. It's called the Implicit Association Test. It's free. It's online. Harvard University and a bunch of these other big-wig universities put this test together. It's been done by millions of people across the world. And it's broken out into different categories. And then you answer the questions and then it tells you what your potential biases are. Why wouldn't anybody want to know? Yeah. And it's a great tool. And, you know, like, for example, look, I took it, right? I took it. And it gave me these four questions. And by the way, I have a seven-year-old son, right? So I was taking the gender test and it asked me, OK, so if you have a daughter, would you feel comfortable dressing your daughter in all pink? Yes. If you have a daughter, do you feel comfortable dressing your daughter in all blue? I didn't hesitate. Yes. Then it flipped it, right? And then it said, if you have a son, do you feel comfortable dressing yourself in all blue? And then came that last question, right? If you have a daughter, I mean, do you feel comfortable dressing your son in all pink? And I paused. I mean, that doesn't make me a bad person. That means somewhere along the way, somebody, my mom probably, put it in there that boys shouldn't wear pink, right? But it's as simple as that. It doesn't mean I'm a bad person. It just means now that I'm aware of it, and if you're thinking, like, why is this important, Sajal? It's your kid. You dress your son in whatever colors you want. Well, it's a lot more complicated than that. Because if I'm a hiring manager and two gentlemen walk in and one has a pink tie on. If I wasn't aware of that bias, who's to say that I might not, you know, give that person a job because of the color of their tie? Right? So it's something that each one of us have to take responsibility for. And the good news is that once you gain awareness of your biases and you know what they are and you practice inclusive behaviors, you can start to rewire your brain. That's the good news. It's totally possible. So it is trainable. Do you think we should start with this at a younger age? I mean, could we, would these be effective? I feel like a lot of stuff doesn't happen until the workforce. And by then people got problems or issues or unconscious, but all this stuff that's never been called out to maybe they've been bullying people off through high school. Now they go get their first job and they're acting like a, you know, a bully. And they're just unaware because no one called it on. They weren't trained. Should we, should we start this younger? Should we start with kids? I mean, we're getting kids bullying each other online, all these other things. Is this something that we're missing in our training early on with people? I mean, I totally think so. And actually they're already doing it. Like as far as the stability and the respect, my son in second grade has a really good program and lots of, I asked that question a lot because I do think it should. And it's already happening. The piece that's not happening though is the unconscious bias piece. There should be some, even if it's at a really fundamental level of just as, you know, just helping them recognize that you might see somebody with darker skin and you might make an automatic assumption because you're not around people with darker skin. That that's the form of buying, you know, just to kind of at least start putting that into their mind so that they don't, they don't go 40 some years before they're like, wait a second, I've got this thing against pink. Right. Yeah. And start to teach each other. So we've got about a minute or so left. What's, if you could wave a magic wand and the workforce was beautiful. What do you think, what do you think would be the one lesson that you would work on first to get them there as quickly as you could. Yeah, and that's I love that question. I think, you know, if I can do one thing was to just get people's mindset to the point of, let's learn to have dialogue with each other. It doesn't have to be a debate. We have to agree on each other's perspective, but go into it with the mindset of doing a dialogue and then come in with the intention to seek a common ground. Right. So we're going to have to compromise. We're going to have differences and opinions, but we have to look at what's in the best interest of just treating each other with a dignity and respect, regardless of whether we agree with each other views or not. Right. And we deserve a certain level of respect and just kind of get people to that point. That would be, you know, it doesn't mean you always get what you want. You always win and everything goes like we would want it to be. But if we can get people to that level of just having these conversations. And so thank you so much for having me on here because, you know, I think it's so important that you're like helping us spread our voices and I have watched some of your other shows and keep up your amazing work. Thank you so much. Sergio, thank you. Thank you so much for joining us and out there and if you're watching us today, ask questions of other and then listen to their answer and try to understand. There's a lot we can learn about other people if we just ask questions instead of running our mouth in one direction all the time. Thanks again. I really appreciate it today. It was excellent. Take care out there. Everybody be safe. Be healthy. Aloha.