We Need Trauma-Informed Workplaces - Start with Governance - September 2022

4 September 2022

On 4 September 2022, Father’s Day, I wrote again to the University leaders and governance of my workplace.

The subject line of my email was:

“We Need Trauma-Informed Workplaces.”

It was September, a month in which mental health awareness was being promoted. For me, this wasn’t an abstract subject.

I had already experienced the devastating loss of my dad to suicide. My family had also been through deeply personal circumstances that belonged to us - not to my employer.

Those circumstances will not be explained publicly now, just as they should not have been violated, discussed, gossiped about and turned into something else completely immoral, to be used against me in my workplace, then.

——

The privacy of my family was part of what I was trying to protect.

Yet, as I explained in my email of 4 September 2022, boundaries around my private family life had been crossed and that intensely personal information had become entangled with the workplace response after I raised concerns about my psychosocial safety.

The intrusion into those boundaries was itself profoundly distressing.

And by September 2022, I was asking a fundamental question: how could an institution speak about mental health, wellbeing and human dignity while I was experiencing its response as further traumatising?

What does a trauma-informed workplace actually look like?

With my email, I included the Harvard Business Review article We Need Trauma-Informed Workplaces.

I wanted the leaders of my workplace to read it because I couldn’t reconcile the principles being publicly discussed about trauma, mental health and workplace wellbeing with what I had experienced.

By 4 September 2022, I wasn’t describing one uncomfortable interaction or an isolated workplace disagreement.

I had been raising serious concerns for years about conduct involving management, HR, employment relations, WHS and wellbeing functions. I had repeatedly documented and reported conduct that involved harassment, failures to protect my psychosocial and psychological safety, interference with my privacy, problems with workers compensation processes and my employment entitlements, and failures to support my recovery and safe return to work.

Whether an organisation is genuinely trauma-informed is surely tested at precisely these moments: when somebody is already vulnerable, raises concerns about safety, and needs those with greater institutional power to respond carefully, respectfully and ethically.

——

I had asked for the problem to be resolved locally

There’s important context to what happened next.

The senior Library manager I was dealing with was an Associate Director within the Library directorate and my manager’s manager.

I had raised concerns about my manager’s behaviour and explained that I felt emotionally unsafe at work. I understood that the matter was to be addressed at the local management level, with responsibility for my workplace safety and wellbeing.

That didn’t happen.

Instead, the matter was handed to HR by this associate director without consultation with me.

That was precisely the escalation I had feared. I knew how toxic the organisation had become at that level. I’d say the toxic culture was at at a dangerous level. I’ve now proven that danger. 

I had approached management seeking help with a workplace safety problem. What followed was not a resolution of the problem I had reported. What came next was an increasingly adversarial process, accompanied by further concerns about my psychosocial safety, psychological safety, workplace rights and wellbeing.

I had wanted the workplace problem addressed.

Instead, I was pushed into entering an entirely different “process” - one in which the original reason I had spoken up seemed to be disappearing.

——

“We have been informed you have family issues affecting your work”

Then came a telephone conversation that has remained deeply troubling to me.

On 3 January 2020, the Associate Director said:

“We have been informed you have family issues affecting your work.”

Members of my family were present and heard the conversation.

Those words disturbed all of us profoundly.

I had raised a concern about workplace behaviour and psychosocial safety. Yet I was now hearing that unidentified people had apparently been discussing private matters concerning my family.

• Who were “we”?

• Who had provided this information?

• What information had been shared?

• Where had it come from?

• And what did any of my family’s private circumstances have to do with the workplace safety concern I had raised?

I will not explain those private circumstances here.

That is precisely the point.

They belonged to my family.

They were not something I wanted circulated, scrutinised or brought into a management response to my request for a psychosocially and psychologically safe workplace.

The violation of those boundaries became another source of trauma.

I had sought help because I felt emotionally unsafe at work. What I needed was for the workplace issue I had reported to be addressed appropriately and safely.

I didn’t need or expected that my family’s private life would be drawn into it.

More than two and a half years later, on 4 September 2022, I was still asking the university’s leaders and governance why this had happened and why my original concerns hadn’t been safely resolved. My email records both the 3 January 2020 conversation and the questions I was still asking about what had happened.

——

The dignity of the human person

There was another contradiction I couldn’t ignore.

This was a Catholic university.

Its mission spoke about the dignity of the human person and the common good. Staff were expected to behave ethically and comply with the Staff Code of Conduct.

So, in my email, I asked:

“How does this display ACU’s community engagement initiatives and mission that includes commitment to the dignity of the human person and common good?”

And then came perhaps the simplest question in the entire email:

“Why?”

• Why was I still struggling to be heard respectfully?

• Why had my complaint not resulted in the protection I had been asking for?

• Why, after such an extensive paper trail, was I still having to explain the harm?

• And why had my family ever been drawn into it?

——

I was more than the complaint in front of them

There was something else I wanted governance to remember.

I wrote:

“I’m a qualified and skilled information manager, researcher and educator with a strong work ethic that my community at ACU know very well through my work with them, academic and professional staff, researchers and students.”

I had devoted approximately two decades of my working life to the university.

There was an extensive record of that contribution.

There was also an extensive paper trail documenting what happened after I finally spoke up and told Library executives that I felt emotionally unsafe because of the behaviour I was experiencing from my manager.

My professional identity mattered.

My contribution mattered.

My health mattered.

My privacy mattered.

And the privacy and dignity of my family mattered too.

——

My dad knew

Father’s Day made this correspondence particularly painful.

My dad had observed some of the workplace dynamics while he was alive. In my email, I recalled that he had worried that my manager would benefit from my work while I would ultimately suffer the consequences.

On 4 September 2022, I wrote:

“In respectful memory of my dad, I won’t give up until governance starts to do what they’re meant to do…”

My dad was gone.

I couldn’t have another conversation with him. Yet on Father’s Day I found myself writing to workplace leaders about circumstances that connected painfully with concerns he had expressed while he was alive.

I was asking governance to intervene.

I was also making clear what I continued to seek: restoration of what had been taken from me, including my accumulated entitlements; restoration of my health; my HEW 8 role at Strathfield Campus Library; appropriate training to update my skills; and the opportunity to recover safely in my job.

I didn’t want my working life to be written off.

I was asking for the harm to stop and for what had happened to be addressed.

——

Trauma-informed cannot simply be a slogan

This is why the article I sent that day mattered.

A trauma-informed workplace can’t exist only in wellbeing campaigns, awareness months, staff communications or carefully chosen institutional language.

Its principles have to become visible when somebody is actually traumatised.

They matter when an employee is grieving.

They matter when private family circumstances exist that are NOT the workplace’s business beyond what an employee chooses, or legitimately needs, to disclose.

They matter when somebody says they feel psychologically unsafe.

They matter when there’s an imbalance of power.

They matter when an employee raises a problem locally and reasonably expects those responsible for their safety and wellbeing to help resolve it.

They matter when that person is struggling to communicate because the very people and processes they are required to engage with have themselves become associated with fear, distress and danger.

And perhaps most importantly, they matter when properly listening to that person might be uncomfortable for the institution.

A traumatised person shouldn’t have to establish that they deserve humane treatment.

Nor should somebody have to become increasingly distressed, increasingly persistent and increasingly public before those in positions of responsibility listen.

——

Father’s Day — 4 September 2022

I ended my email:

“Happy Father’s Day and mental health awareness month.”

There’s something deeply sad about those words when I read them.

It was Father’s Day.

I should have been able to remember my dad privately.

Instead, grief, family privacy, workplace psychological and psychosocial safety and institutional accountability had become painfully intertwined.

And that’s one reason I’m drawing a boundary around some of those details.

——

My family is not the story.

The story is that I went to senior management because I felt emotionally unsafe in my workplace.

The story is what happened after I asked for help.

The story is why private matters concerning my family entered that response at all.

And the story is why, more than two and a half years later, I was still asking those responsible for governance to listen.

On 4 September 2022, behind all the processes, departments, policies, job titles and correspondence was a person.

A person grieving her father.

A person trying to protect her family.

A person trying to protect her own health.

A person who wanted to recover safely in the work she had performed honourably for approximately two decades.

And a person asking those responsible for governance to finally listen.

That’s why I sent them an article about trauma-informed workplaces.

By then, I didn’t need another statement about wellbeing.

I needed my workplace to practise it.

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Document 469.

Reference

Brower, T. (2022, 4 March). We Need Trauma-Informed Workplaces. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2022/03/we-need-trauma-informed-workplaces