I don’t want to get into allegations about any particular individual (beyond acknowledging this thread was prompted by a recent incident).
Let’s say you work in some business. There is a person you have encountered but don’t know personally. You have begun hearing comments about this person’s behavior. There are rumors that they engage in some bad acts that potentially harm other people.
Here’s an important qualification; you have never personally been involved in or directly witnessed any of these bad acts. Everything you know is based on second (or more) hand information.
What’s the right thing to do in this situation?
Should you go public with the information you’ve heard? By doing so, you will get the information out there and make potential victims aware of this person’s behavior.
But you don’t have any direct knowledge of this behavior. The rumors you’ve heard could be false. But regardless of whether they are true or false, by making them public you will be doing irreparable harm to this person - who might be innocent.
I know everybody likes to think of HR as the bad guys but they are trained to handle situations like these. Where rumors exist but the actions taken have to be careful and precise so people don’t start suing each other and the company.
I would mention it in full confidentiality to your HR rep and then leave it alone. Going public with it could get you into a lot of trouble.
Unless it might cause physical harm or danger, I’d stay out of it.
If it might trigger someone’s feelings, embarrass them or cause them to cry in their pillow, you can’t know.
You might assume. You might have “heard” it would hurt their feelings. You have no way of knowing what safeguards a person has installed into their psyche to fight these kinda things.
Often, no. Rumors are more likely to spread among “insiders”. The question is when and whether you should make the general public aware of this inside information.
HR is trained to cover the company’s ass. Stating that HR is “trained to handle situations like these” begs the question “Handle it how, and to whose benefit?”
I would avoid calling it “information” at this point, the only fact established so far is that the rumors are being spread by some people. The rumors could have been started by one person with a grudge, and then worked their way around to you through difference paths. I would be very careful about spreading them anywhere.
One reason I’m asking these questions is because something I’ve heard in several cases where a public figure’s activities have become public knowledge is people saying “Why didn’t the other people that have known about this for years say something?” And it’s a valid question. I’m trying to figure out when minding your business and not spreading rumors moves into complicity.
Rereading that, I want to add that this is a purely theoretical matter for me. I don’t know any suspicious rumors about anyone that aren’t already public knowledge.
Public figures are just that public figures.
Any thing about them is bound to become public.
I think they are often surprised when their privacy becomes public. I also think they’ve put themselves in this place. (Adults, children are a different matter).
It’s sad when privacy is made common knowledge when it’s about grief or medical problems. It’s the way the world is now.
I can’t understand anyone enjoying any of it.
If the said public figure is a danger to himself then of course someone close to him should find help. Say in the case of Michael Jackson, he surrounded himself with crap people who didn’t care all that much. Maybe he’d rather his abusive family weren’t around and had no choice and got taken advantage of. We’ll never know.
We do know he was an addict and clearly a danger to himself. Telling that rumor was done, to no avail.
Hundreds of cases like that.
Telling a rumor or hinting at a story would likely do no good. Most are already well known even if people lip service that there’s no truth to it.
There’s a difference between knowing about something and hearing about something. People who know about something can be responsible for speaking; people who just hear about something, well, what can they do? They don’t actually know anything.
As for spreading rumors: that’s a judgement call. If you think the rumors are valid, feel free to spread them, so long as you make clear that they are just rumors. After all, it’s not like they won’t spread without you.
To restate what @Alessan said, there is a difference between hearing a rumor and witnessing an incident. Rumors may alert you to be on the lookout for certain behavior, or even make you reconsider prior things you witnessed, but unless you are the supervisor/parent/etc of one of the people involved, there probably isn’t any appropriate action to be taken on just a rumor.
I was adjacent to a similar situation in an organization I’m involved with. One of the members had always been rumored to occasionally behave inappropriately. I never directly witnessed it, but the rumors were pervasive and long lasting enough, that I always assumed they were true on some level. I did nothing, because I never saw anything, was never asked for help (directly or indirectly) by a person involved, am not in a leadership position where it is my responsibility to do something, and I know that those in a leadership position were aware of the same rumors.
Because of that, I felt like if I went to the leadership, I would just be continuing to spread rumors. I had no new information to provide.
What I did do was create a mechanism for onymous or anonymous reports to be made to those in leadership. After years of the system being in place, several reports were made about the person in question, and the leadership decided to kick them out of the organization.
It’s not really possible to answer without specifics. What are the rumors about? Sexual harassment? being kind of an arsehole? habitually driving drunk? stock piling weapons and threatening to perform a mass shooting?
How I’d react to each of them is different. Also what kind of rumors are we talking here? Just “people say that Fred…” Or does someone I know and respect have first hand experience of them doing whatever it is
This. It can range from character assassination, like the story told here (which happens all the time, especially when HR is in on it), to the exalted esteem in which society holds whistleblowers
“Human Resources” has a primary mission to protect the company from liability. While there are HR representatives who will make the effort to be fair and equanimous in looking out for the interests of employees and line managers, the overriding interest is in preventing the company or its principals from liability. This may mean that the person reporting the issue may be the one bearing the brunt of the ‘correction’, particularly if the allegations turn out to be false or unsubstantiated, and sometimes even if they are absolutely true.
The notion that you can report anything to HR with the assurance of “full confidentiality” or any kind of legal protection is risible to say the least. At risk of painting with an overly broad brush, I’ve generally found HR reps (and especially director/VP level) often to be enormous gossips, and not infrequently the worst offenders of the policies they are supposed to enforce, particularly if they involve people near the top of the management chain or the they have personal relationships (friendship or…otherwise). I actually had an HR rep give my personal cell phone number to a disgruntled (and shortly to be terminated) employee after I was directed to not interact with said employee, which put me in the awkward position of then having to report back to that rep who noted it as an ‘infraction’ on my part even though I had not initiated the communication.
As for reporting ‘rumors’ and other hearsay, you should encourage the people being directly impacted by the alleged behavior to report to their supervisor, or in lieu of that, report to the supervisor of the alleged offender so that they can deal with it from a management perspective before going up to HR unless they have good reason to believe that said managers will cover or engage in retribution, of course. Going direct to HR from a non-supervisory position essentially kicks off an investigation outside of the manager’s purview (and in many cases even knowledge) based upon the say-so of someone with no direct evidence or witness of the supposed offenses. This is problematic for the manager who may be blindsided instead of being notified and involved about a disciplinary issue with the opportunity to weigh in on the credibility and context of the claims, and problematic for the employee alleged to have committed the offenses who may find themselves in the midst of an investigation without any idea of the supposed violations or any counseling or disciplinary action at the manager level. Once HR gets involved, essentially everything is ‘on the record’ even if it was a simple misunderstanding or baseless rumor.
All interactions with HR and the affected employees and managers should be documented, at least in a dated handwritten journal, and preferably in email (especially when it comes to interactions with HR) such that there is a formal record of what was communicated, to whom, and when. If the HR rep tells you to stop communicating via email and to deliver your personal journal to them, flatly refuse as they have no authority to either deny you the ability to report via whatever direct channel or to keep personal documentation of work interactions that does not include any PII or proprietary/controlled information.
Engaging in your own personal investigation of the alleged issue is about the worst thing you can do because not only can it look as if you are ‘stirring the pot’ but you may also be seen as influencing people who have witnessed it. And unless you are in the management chain or HR, you have absolutely no business inserting yourself into a potential conflict. Again, the appropriate thing to do is to advise the affected people to report to their management chain, or else to report to HR if they do not have confidence that their management will protect them.
Where do you get that idea? If someone tells me so-and-so has child porn on their computer I’m going to ask them if they saw it themselves or heard it from someone else. From that point I can decide what action to take next. Your idea is to stick your head in the sand and forget about. How well do you think that works out in the end?
When you said “go back to the people who said something about him” , it didn’t sound like you were talking about a single conversation. Asking immediately in the same conversation is very different from hearing about it on Monday and going back to ask for more info on Wed
Which is what I would do if I found that person credible. I’m not going to advise someone to take it to HR or their management chain when they have not actually seen anything. If they’re spreading false rumors that would just be advising them to spread false rumors among people who could really screw things up. If someone says they’ve seen child porn on someone’s computer, and they can describe something that is truly child porn and not just a picture of children playing in a pool, then I’m going to advise them to go to the police. I’ll tell them that if they just want to talk to management they have to follow up and make sure the police get notified. Their reaction is also another way to judge their credibility. If someone tells me that they’ve witnessed a crime both of us now have an obligation to follow up on it properly.