R-E-S-P-E-C-T: Practical Tips to Prevent Abuse & Build Team Trust

[Music] hello hi everybody i'm emily greer and i really appreciate anybody who is spending 45 minutes today on this wavy topic and really engaging with it uh there's a couple of things i want to start out with just to let you know how it's going this topic is so big that i have more than 45 minutes of content um in the deck and i'm gonna have to go through it really fast i've got notes on everything that i wanted to say and i'm gonna release the deck with all of those notes um so you can see it at the end um the other is that um i have a lot of good place uh gifts in here and that's because it's one of my favorite shows and i think it talks about a lot of the issues here only as much if much funnier and much more philosophical and on the grander scale so to give context to how i'm going to talk about harassment and abuse i'm talking about it from the

perspective of leadership and what leaders can do and that comes in the context of my own experience which is 14 years in games um all of it as a co-founder and leader of a company most of you know me from co-founding congregate back in 2006 i left there a year ago and have started a mobile game studio called double loop now but most of this talk is going to be referencing my congregate years because that was 13 and because we went through the whole journey there from you know just two founders all the way up to 120 boys we were part of gamestop for seven years we had two offices um almost from the start that had four offices and 120 employees um by the end so really went through kind of the whole a big spectrum of growth and that is um and learned a lot and made a lot of mistakes and i'm going to talk about that here so over the last few years there's been um

kind of waves of harassment allegations coming out kind of every six months or so and if you look at those they really cross the whole divide of the industry you see lots of triple a publishers that you also see you know tiny small india's indie studios being mentioned technology companies game streamers everybody seems to be impacted by this problem and even though so many so much has come out if you talk to women in the industry the sentiment that you're going to hear again and again is that we're surprised that more hasn't come out because this just feels like the tip of the iceberg from what we know from our own stories and what we have heard from our friends and the statistics that you see for the us broadly um kind of bear sort of support our feeling that we still really haven't heard that much from the u.s equal employment opportunity commission the eeoc which i'm going to reference um many

times released a really great report in 2016 that had a lot of stats and other surveys support this as well and it shows that 60 of us women and 20 percent of u.s men have experienced sexual or gender-based harassment at work sexual or gender-based harassment almost all of it at work now what's the difference between sexual harassment and gender-based harassment sexual harassment is unwanted sexual attention gender-based harassment is harassment based on your gender um but not necessarily with sexual intent now these two categories are not are a little fluid because especially you find that a lot of gender-based harassment uses sexual terms but it is still good to think about them separately and to include both of them and it's not just sexual harassment um this shows all of the complaints that the eeoc got in 2015 and while gender and sex is the number one category race and

is not far behind and a lot of other categories show up as well note that these um add up to more than 100 percent and that's because people can volunteer into multiple categories at the same time interception intersectionality as it's called and um you know it seems from um what this the data seems to show is that people in underrepresented minorities show similar reports similar level of harass levels of harassment as women and it's not hard to assume that people who are in multiple categories experience an even more disproportionate amount of harassment so when cases come out and stories come out it's really easy to sort of you know shudder and say god that's awful i had no idea and think well it's good it's been revealed now that person um is out of the industry and we can move on but there's been so many cases

across so much of the industry that i think it's time to really grapple with the fact that it's not just one company and it's not just a few people it's systemic and bad actors are flourishing in games at a broad scale so you know knowing that it's um pretty easy to get mired down in sort of uh the fact that you know humans can really suck um and easy to think you know this is inevitable there's not much we can do it happens in lots of industries not just games and for our hands up but you know i wouldn't be giving this talk if i thought it was inevitable i have sort of general theory of how humans behave and because i'm me i put it in chart form i can't i can't do it i talk about chart um but that general philosophy is that um you know there's some small percentage of people who will be good and kind and respectful and supportive

in any situation and there's a small percentage of people who are sort of true predators who are truly cruel and will be terrible in any situation but most of us are ordinary and most of us are reacting to the norms of the people that we're around and we're in the middle and when we live up and down to what we see around us and what we think is expected of us um but are those group norms fixed they're not in companies there's a series of things that strongly influence group norms what's modeled by leaders what's rewarded or incentivized i think like the wells fargo scandals from a few years ago what behavior is tolerated and then cultural norms of individual employees and places they've worked in the past now if you look at those the first three are all things that the leaders have direct influence over and generally direct control and that

means that leaders of companies have tremendous tremendous impact on the norms of those companies uber is a really great case study of that um travis kalanick the founder it's a little indifferent to rules um i think it can be safely said um you know uber was founded with the with the desire to sort of you know undermine and ignore taxi regulations and that kind of attitude created a great new industry but it also created a sort of pervasive atmosphere where you know rules did not matter and legal legality did not matter and that became very clear when susan fowler did a blog post um about the sexual harassment really egregious sexual harassment that she experienced from her manager there but that was ignored even though there were many many complaints of women because he was a high performer and you know uh too important to let go now that all

came to a head and he kalanick was ousted from the ceo but you can see that it was really you know kind of top to bottom it wasn't just the leader it it it infiltrated the whole company on the other side of it you see big huge games which has you know goes back to 2000 focus at baltimore studio that focuses on strategy games um they went under when 38 studios went under went bankrupt back in sometime in the 2000s and they decided to reboot in 2013. the leadership was really shocked by what was happening in gamergate and decided to really focus on changing the culture and making it more inclusive and diverse and the rebated company even though it had a lot of the same team and a lot of the same leadership had really different group norms than the original version of the company i think it would be a great gdc talk and i hope tim train and the others there will sometime talk about it because they've really done a lot

so the thing is uber is a really successful company does it matter if my company's culture is toxic or even just a little bit neutral i there are a lot of reasons why um it really is a problem um the costs are real and it starts with the very real pain that individuals who experience harassment and abuse suffer all the way up to what can just frankly be called ptsd and all of those costs physical and emotional end up rolling up into organizational costs looking at this list of things that the eoc cites it's not just the people experiencing harassment who have debilitating job dissatisfaction or avoiding the team member or considerably leaving people who witness harassment also have a lot of those same emotions and feelings and it affects um

much more broadly than just the one person you also see lawsuits and reputational damage and hiring and recruiting impacts and if you think about it all of these sorts of things have hit riot in the last two years since the cataclysmic poll came out and who does anybody really want their company to go through that um not really something i've talked about that are sort of negative things that you want to avoid um costs um that can hit you but there's a carrot too and that's that your team will be more effective effective if you eliminate abuse and harassment and it's not just coming from me this is the basis comes from a lot of research on psychological safety psychological safety is when team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other and google who've done extensive research on teams has found this to be far and away the number one most important factor in team effectiveness

there's four others there but psychological safety was really really crucial and it's not just google who's seen this the games outcomes project which research games projects specifically from indie teams to aaa found that psychological safety and team trust was one of the very few factors that strongly correlated with the financial and critical success of games and when you think about it how can any member of a team feel safe if somebody on that team whether it's them or not is getting abused and harassed you're never going to feel comfortable and safe and trusting in that environment so um hopefully now you're ready to absolutely eliminate harassment and abuse in your company but to do that you really need to understand what's driving that and to do that and it's not what people always think and to help eliminate that i'm going to tell a story of my own

going back to the gdc from 11 years ago in 2009. i was been in the industry about two and a half years less than three since we started congregate and i'm still very much on the fringes this was um the first time i started to be included i was invited or actually my brother was invited to a dinner um organized by a triple a company he couldn't go so i was subbed in and a first big party that i've gone to attached to gdc and i had a great time i sat next to really interesting people we had a great discussion i was feeling really warm and included and part of games for the first time um as the dinner went on we people started to get up and leave and mingle and talk to people who are in different parts of the table um i talked to several people and probably around 10 p.m i was talking to very senior exec from one of the fast rising social game companies

that were sort of the big news of the time and we started talking about a potential distribution deal because congregate although not making tons of money at that point we had a lot of traffic so we're talking about that deal and then suddenly his language just totally changed and he started talking about it in sexual terms um you know we don't need to get married um we can make this deal one night stand and starts making um sexual hand gestures at me and i think the [ __ ] gesture as well and um i was sort of like really taken aback and shocked like what just happened here is he is this a quid pro co is he does he want me to have sex with him to get a distribution deal is this what he thinks is going on i was whatever it was i was you know kind of grossed out and freaked out and just i quickly said goodbye and i left and i grabbed a taxi and i remember being in the taxi feeling

kind of you know really small and dirty i really wanted a shower i remember that and all that lovely feeling of belonging and that i was you kind of meant to be there had evaporated but you know tomorrow's the next day i tell my brother and some co-workers but didn't really feel like there was anything to do and kind of moved on except for that i couldn't stop thinking about it and one of the things that always really puzzled me about this story is um if that guy really wanted me to sleep with him or do a deal either one that was a really terrible way to go about it absolutely terrible like there was no way that i would consider sleeping with them under those circumstances and you know over time that helped me um get to the inside which is really broadly supported that harassment is sometimes about sex but it's always about power he was getting a thrill out of having something that he could throw at me that i might

wanna might be willing to have uh sex with him for right like he felt like sort of big swinging man because of that and even though i was sort of grossed out and pulled away you probably gotta throw out of that too you know pushing my buttons grossing me out goes back to the playground that that's kind of its own power move now you know this is a environment where you know that company was bigger and more famous than mine but there's no sort of direct hierarchy between us but when you get into um you know employee to employee abuse and harassment especially in toxic and hierarchical environments harassment is usually used to enforce the pecking order and to control and push out rivals um if you're a man you might be called a [ __ ] idiot or a racist or homophobic slur but if you're a woman it's nearly always going to be phrased in sexual terms i think this quote that came out of one of the liberation articles on

ubisoft really shows that dynamic where the creative director was pushing down on a woman who was asking something of him um in a very very um graphic sexual sexual language now gender is what i've talked about quite a bit but i think it's good to abstract to think of this as in group versus out group now the in groups and out groups are going to line up usually along the lines of things that are in groups and out groups of the society we come from so gender and race and class sexual orientation things like that but really they can be you know almost anything as well and these things can layer on top of each other they could be what part of the industry you're in or what you look like or are you know are you dev team or publishing team almost anything can can be the fault lines for in groups and out groups and um so it's helpful

to think about it that way especially because you know what's you know going to be strongest in the us might be totally different in japan or europe or latin america however i do think with the games industry you gender is always going to be a really strong part of it in part because it's set in this broader context of the gaming culture that is very proudly sort of a boys club now it's hard to tease out cause and effect here because they definitely reinforce each other but i do think that gender is probably the most universal living games um this is again backed up by research from the eeoc they put together a list of major workplace risk factors for harassment and you look at this list and most of them have to do with in-group out-group and power and power disparities you also look at this list and almost all of them occur in the

games industry so it's not surprising that we have a harassment problem [Music] the other thing to think about um is that harassment happens on a continuum there's you know there's things that you can look at and say oh that is clearly harassment that's clearly illegal but it's generally happening within a context where there's lots of things that led up to it and um that are not necessarily illegal though they might be if they're happening enough companies have been focusing for a long time on just sort of eliminating illegal harassment and the most egregious stuff but to create a safe environment and to create a respected environment you have to deal with that whole spectrum which includes a lot of things that are sort of more accepted and more very aware in order to really create a culture of respect and you can't have asked this i can't emphasize this enough your culture is defined by what you

choose to do when it's inconvenient not by what you say when it's expected everybody can see through um pr pieces that are oh we're sorry oh we can do better or check the box um that are required by the state we know what you think is important by what you give your time your attention and your budget to and you're going to need that to really deal with harassment because harassment is so much about power the most underlying factor that you can use to create cultures of respect and to reduce enragement harassment is to minimize the power differential between people or at least the perceived importance of that power uh that doesn't mean going to hellocracy or some other kind of flat organization harassment can thrive just fine when in a world with no bosses but it does mean that you need to think about

the separation and betw of people in your organization and what that means and how it's perceived to put it in games terms you want a balanced party and a culture of respect in groups and out groups fade because everybody values the different experiences and the different skills that people are bringing to the party and you need a whole party working together um to you know beat the monster or you know create a great game but to get to that kind of culture you need to fight the leaderboard mentality where people are thinking of it as a hierarchy where uh they are rising and getting higher if they're pushing somebody else down and pushing them down below them um one of the best ways to to eliminate the power differential differential is for leaders to essentially invert it in their mind and there's a sort of concept of servant

leadership that i think is really useful there where it becomes not about the leaders being you know the big people who are in charge and important their job is to serve the people doing the work broadly and empowering them and teaching teaching them and listening to them and rising them up um in broader culture one of the most famous examples is costco which really focuses on making their jobs great for the employees and are rewarded with tremendous retention um and loyalty um they've done things like in the last financial recession they actually gave their employees a raise when sales were down because they felt their employees needed it in games i think supercell is a culture that whether they think they follow this or not this is very much kind of the model where the ceo is there to serve the games team another thing that i personally went

through as congregate grew was that i needed to learn how to uh watch my words in a much more um in a very different way um i'm sort of quick to say things and uh say a lot of things off the cuff and that was totally fine when we were five employees when even when we were 15 employees that as we grew and people came into the company knowing my name and thinking i was important as ceo i had to change how i talked to people i still felt like the same approachable you know easygoing person but they had a lot of natural fear of me and i needed to be very careful about things that i said um either praise or criticism and i needed to think about those casual remarks so i encourage anybody who is in leadership and going through it to think about okay what's your self-image versus how your employees think about you and really think about how you talk to them

another thing that we struggled with sometimes at congregate um was distinguishing lack of conflict um niceness from respect it's really important for everybody whether you're you know individual or a company to be able to hear criticism and act on it in order to really grow and flourish and there's a lot of companies where in trying to get away from people being abusive and cruel you get into the norm where nobody can say anything critical and that's not great you need to be able to express thoughtful criticism and you need to be able to deal with the things that are bad and are um and are important and you need to be able to fire somebody because if you can't um undercover harassers are going to thrive so think about that distinction am i being nice or am i being truly

respectful i could talk about communication um all day and i don't have that time so i'm just going to point out these two books that i think have been very helpful for me and i think can be very helpful to anyone and i encourage everybody to spend a lot of time on working on their communication one thing i think is really important um is to set the time set the tone early with new hires people come in feeling insecure and both helping them see what's expected and also making them feel safe is really important very quickly a couple things we did at congregate one is that i went out of my way to greet every new hire didn't wait for them to be taken around to greet me and made sure that they knew that i knew who they were and thought that they were important um and i heard from a lot of company a lot of people when i left that that was actually specifically really meaningful it only took five or ten minutes on their first day but it really set the

tone of what the company was like and what i was like so i highly recommend it um new hire orientation was also great um and one of the things i think was important in there was that i put in a slide sharing my worst mistake which is that i said no to minecraft really big mistake right uh and we have a successful company anyway and i because i wanted um very quickly for employees to know that it was okay to be vulnerable it was okay to make mistakes the fastest way to do that is for me to say to show um that i had really act up um another thing is you should have no vips there shouldn't be special travel rules or special vacation policies for people who are executives um everybody should be fundamentally be treated the same and that includes you know access to you know bonus programs or equity even if they're participating in a much smaller rate everybody should be able to um be included the other

side of that is sharing communal responsibilities things that everybody needs to do a rotating kitchen um uh duty was really effective at concrete and i think it was always really powerful um for people to see my name and my brother's name on that list and to see us in there doing something that was serving them people talk a lot about transparent communication and access to leadership um it's really common for companies to do regular business updates but you really need to go beyond that for best results and have everybody feel like you know they can really um reach out and talk to leadership and that leadership will be honest and that includes not just cheerleading but also talking about real challenges and how we're addressing that um having any kind of system where people can ask anonymous questions really is helpful because that um even if they don't use it the fact that we're willing to take anonymous questions

um um really opens up the feeling of trust um getting people to talk to other levels through skip level one-on-ones things like that is really great and definitely think about remote employees and people at other locations to make sure that they have similar access uh you also need to actively look for red flags there's always going to be some people who are charming and cooperative with you um but uh um you know the kiss up and kick down type of personality um who behave very differently with others um so you to look for those you need to not look just how they behave in front of you but look at signs of how they're behaving elsewhere um here's a list of things you definitely want to do exit interviews you definitely want to watch out for anybody who's regularly getting into any kind of feud with peers or other types of um of other types of groups because those

are red flags um that are very serious um the most uh serious harassment case i dealt with that congregate that was employed employee the manager involved had pretty much all of these flags over his tenure now this is a topic i can't go into very deeply but one of the most important ways we show how we value people is how we pay them and how we promote them and there's a lot of common practices and especially in u.s compensation that create disparities over time um i created a scenario here looking at a bunch of different junior hires that hopefully you can go over later but the thing that i want you to take away is to answer this question if your if everybody in your company's pay and compensation was released publicly tomorrow could you defend it if you can't that means that you need to do more work in terms of analyzing the equity between people and

the equity relative to the market and you need to do that on a regular basis so you probably noticed on the previous eeocle slide that one of the factors for harassment was uh workplaces that tolerated or encouraged alcohol and we all know this is true in the games industry i'm certainly been a problem with that over the years i've had a lot of fun nights out with employees and industry friends drinking but i've also seen the problems with that including you know uh an indie dev who got you know blackout trunk and followed me around around a party you know trying to hug me and announcing that i was going to be the future mother of his children and other things that were just really awkward for everybody um over time at congress we managed to make that call the the um the culture less alcohol-centric and part of that was how we organized events um the times how we did things making sure there was always food the

one [ __ ] showy holiday party we had was because there was not enough food but also making sure there was no peer pressure to drink we played beer pong on a regular basis but it was totally common practice for people to um play with water in their cups um because they were sick or they didn't like beer or they didn't drink and that was totally okay and you need to make that okay within your company dating is another element in sort of fun things that become pretty problematic quickly i've put in a base policy here everybody should have a base policy one thing that i would add on top of that is that you also really need to think about the that people above a certain level it doesn't matter what the reporting structure is they're always going to have a power differential with the people below them and i think especially for the top level founders c level and anybody in hr you should have us have dating be strictly

prohibited there's no situation in which that doesn't end up being messy in a breach of trust and you really don't want any situation where somebody high level is treating the company as their sort of personal tinder goal i also have a spicy take that employees are more likely to date each other if they're working you know 70 80s hours a week and not seeing other people so don't crash and it's less of a problem but even with all of these things that that have happened and that you're doing you need to be realistic that they're still going to be abuse you can get the vast majority of the group to sort of better more respectful norms but there's always that percentage of people who are going to want to be abusive and kind of get off on on that and you need to be prepared especially because once you've changed the surface the culture of surface culture and the group norms then it's going to

go underground people are going to know it's not okay but they're going to figure out ways to make it more covert more discreet and that means you need to work harder to find it and deal with it so a little context here um i'm gonna tell another personal story and this is from one from the um time that we were owned by gamestop um i was at a party at the buffet line and uh gamestop exec we worked with um was on one side of me and then went to the other side of me and in that process um i took advantage of uh reasonable touching me to actually grope me and um very typically i froze what happened did this really happen um i didn't want to make a scene um but so i just sort of walked away and um didn't deal with it right then but once the party was over i told my brother about it um and he was really skeptical he

thought i must have imagined it it didn't really happen and i remember thinking well i'm 411. no normal hype man um uh naturally um touches the lower part of my ass and groin area i really don't think this was accidental you have to bend your knees you have to to reach to make this happen um but if my own brother who loves me and respects me doesn't think this is true what's the point of going to hr or talking to anybody else about this right the man would deny it i'd get into a fight nothing would happen i'd damage my position within gamestop and have created an enemy and just didn't seem worth it and so i decided to do nothing um but it still continued to bother me over the years and i was you know angry that he got away with it i was worried that he was doing um you know that and worse to other women and i that i

hadn't been done anything to prevent it i was also really sort of disappointed with my brother um on on that um the good news is that after we two came out we had a we talked about it and he's really apologetic now and and gets it um and i don't want to talk badly about gamestop because this story isn't really about gamestop i found the culture there to be totally fine or i wouldn't have stayed for you know many years past my earn out in particular i really came to like and respect my boss um but even in a sort of a typical company with a not very bad culture it really didn't feel safe making a harassment complaint and that is totally typical um only a tiny tiny fraction 1 in 10 1 in 15 1 and 20 of harassment and abuses these cases ever gets reported and you know per the eeoc it's all exactly the same reasons why i didn't report to it to gamestop um and

everything i did was exactly totally totally typical so when you think about preventing harassment and you need to think about creating systems that break through this how do you make the victim feel like they're going to be believed before they report how do you make them feel like something is going to be done to really deal with this and how do you make them feel safe to actually tell you about it the other thing that hap that goes along with this is that you actually need to um accept that getting harassment ports is actually positive because it means that your employees have faith in the system and they have faith in you to take it seriously um going to social media going to uh to the newspapers going to a lawsuit these are all sort of the the actions of people who have no hope of any other recourse

so if you get a harassment play complaint even if it feels terrible it actually is a positive thing and means that you're doing something right so what kind of systems do you need first of all you need a real harassment policy um not just something you pick up the internet or legal or hr prepares it needs to be something that's accessible and specific and not at all generic and everybody can understand and it needs to cover that whole spectrum not just what's illegal but what's inappropriate and everything that you don't want to be happening in your in your company and then you need to give that to your employees and get their feedback because nobody is going to know um uh what's the real situation and what the dangers are in your particular context more than your employees and once you incorporate that feedback you're going to have something that people have bought in on at a different level so um do that that's the first starting point the other thing is

make concrete plans as much as possible um when something unexpected happens especially something complex and stressful our first reaction is to freeze you've seen me do that in multiple multiple situations and when people freeze inaction is the default response the more that you plan in advance the more that you think things through the more that you give clear paths for escalation the more quickly and the more consistent you look at so you know set up a small group thanks um um get practice in terms of taking um investigations and things like that um identify things um like uh gdc or the company holiday party where stuff is more likely to happen and develop a mitigation plan including like things like you know having food there and having a point person and sending out an email in advance saying

if anything happens please come you know out come to this person and then they will help you deal with it all of that helps um one thing i also used to do is reach out to higher risk groups um so because most of my negative experiences were interacting with the outside world i would talk to our bd people and tell them if this happens to you if if you see something please come to me it's happened to me i will believe you so um they would know um that i was there i think interns in particular is a group that you should think about um as they're going to have less resources in terms of um connections to other people or understanding of what's normal in the workplace and you need to prepare for ambiguity if you think about both of the cases that i've reported um and told you about here there's no witnesses there's no evidence it's only you know me versus

what that person would say and that's going to be common there's also going to be stories that have a mix of consensual and non-consensual behavior or you know bad behavior on both sides or you know bad choices all of those things and you're going to have to think about them and come to some sort of synthesis of you know what the truth is but you need to do that in a con in the context of understanding how difficult it is for reporters to report they're taking a lot of risks and you know when you think about um a court of law it's absolutely absolutely right that the system should be innocent until proven guilty but when you're thinking about an internal investigation are you ready for this to happen to another employee maybe 10 or 20 more employees before you get even one more report

you need to think about what given the severity of what happened um what what balance do you want to strike there and what makes sense but that doesn't mean that you want to fire everybody um people will often talk about zero harassment policies but those can really backfire because they mean that people won't necessarily report something more minor because they're afraid of getting people fired you need to look at you know what's the context what was the intent what's the pattern were they drunk all of those things to help put together um what the correct response is in any situation and hopefully it's going to be just some sort of warning or talking to or therapy or some other situation something like that part of respect is having faith that people can learn and grow and change but the caveat that with that is that anything predatory or very cool still needs to be dealt with swiftly and harshly you also really need to think

through the fact that no one can be too valuable to fire in the games outcomes project um besides team trust and psychologist psychological safety one of the other factors that was really really crucial was clarity of vision for the game and that actually being really important i think has made the games industry fall very hard for the myth of the [ __ ] genius but you have to question are they really more of a creative visionary or are they just better at talking over people than other people are they good at stifling dissent are they better at taking credit for somebody else's work we often mistake aggressiveness for leadership as humans and once this pattern sets in itself reproduces because um younger people think that's what they're supposed to act like and more collaborative creative visionaries might get forced out or not recognized because

the pattern has been set i'm a big basketball fan and there's a stat called plus minus which looks at the effect um the whole team's output when the player is on the floor because that helps distinguish what's the what effect are they having on their team and their teammates from what their individual stats are and i think a lot of these sort of [ __ ] creative geniuses if you are should be looked at in that kind of context they may look good from one particular frame but they're the reason why people quit they're the reason why people are afraid to criticize the game they're the reason people are afraid to make suggestions and games is absolutely a team effort outside of you know solo indeed projects it's they're always going to be judged on the team effectiveness and not the individual now um the other thing you really need to think about is safety um the process of reporting can be really traumatic i felt nauseous when i was rehearsing to

tell some of my stories here and that's at a you know fraction of what's going on for people who are reporting it immediately after they happen so focus on everything you can do to make them feel safe and in particular you need to focus on not allowing any kind of retaliation or any kind of pressure for them to work it out or be okay with it do not make them go to lunch with their harasser do not make them feel pressure to accept compromises that they do not feel safe with but you also need to balance victim needs and consistency of policy and that can be really really challenging if you have limited time um focus your effort on managers that's who's driving the individual experience of most people day to day and mostly they've gotten dropped into management without much training managing their peers their former peers and having had lots of bad modeling that really sucks invest in their training their support

and their mentorship and you also really want to encourage bystander action um traditional training that focuses on just what's legal and illegal and just on managers is you know probably ineffective at best but there's some research that shows that training that focuses on teaching people if they're bystanders to some kind of harassment how to recognize it and how to intervene and how to help after the fact is much more effective and it makes sense because it's much more positive and it gives people a sense of what they can do it goes back to that concrete plans type of advice that i gave previously and i certainly saw bystander action really kick in several times to congregate in positive ways unfortunately i don't have time to tell the stories here and i know i've given you a lot um but you don't have to tackle it all at once and not all of it is going to be appropriate um for your company 10 person studios

are totally different from a 10 000 person um uh big publisher but you need to start somewhere so think about the the principles that i've sort of conveyed and think about okay what works um in our context what can we do what's going to be authentic to us and if you're a manager um within one of these larger organizations you know think about okay i can't get everybody on board but i can make my team feel safer i can make my team feel better with my own leadership and my own communication and as an individual bystander i can learn how i might intervene or think that through and be ready to help everybody leaders have the most impact but everybody can do this and we can do it gradually over time and make the industry better and it's absolutely worth it um i was feeling depressed last year um when i saw a whole wave of me too stories came out and this popped up in my twitter feed from a former congregate employee

um now at big huge games actually and she was posting about her good experience being harassed at a gdc party actually our gdc party where a ad network representative that we were working with showed up started harassing her really aggressively followed her around the bar she got the bouncer to help get him out he think he hit the bouncer he definitely pulled the fire alarm it was a whole scene um and but she was very smart and she had gotten his business card and um you know the next day we all came together and put together a plan particularly zoe our hr manager and the vp of marketing um to deal with it and got statements from everybody zoe the bar a bunch of other witnesses and put them together and took them to that ad network as a pretty package um and they verified that it happened and three days later that guy was fired and as zoe says um a disturbing experience went turned

into something that felt really empowering and so if you're in a position of power be like everyone in that story make the right thing happen so thank you here are a list of resources and links and as i said i'm going to post the whole um talk and the slides with all of my notes on twitter at mmg thank you very much [Music] [Applause]