It’s a messy world, and the workplace is starting to reflect it.
Employee claims of discrimination, harassment, and retaliation reached 14.7 per 1,000 employees in 2024, according to a recent report from case management software company HR Acuity, the highest level since the company started tracking these stats nine years ago. The biggest issues in these claims include a 21% increase in accommodation requests, 15% more mental health issues, 13% more job performance disputes, and 12% more unprofessional conduct/policy violations.
“The workplace has just gotten more complicated. There’s economic pressures, social division, [and] non-stop change…When the environment gets messy, behaviors tend to follow in that way,” said Deb Muller, HR Acuity’s CEO and founder. “That’s why we’re seeing this.”
What’s going on? Since the pandemic, Muller said accommodation requests have risen because more employees are advocating for what they need.
“Accommodations post-Covid have gotten more mainstream…They’re willing to talk about or ask for accommodations related to invisible disabilities that they might be dealing with, where before, they weren’t,” Muller said. “[As] companies are having employees come back to the office, accommodations become a big thing.”
Workplace compliance has also gotten more intricate as the new administration has taken charge, so Muller cautions people pros to be “as precise and fair” as they can when it comes to employee claims.
“Claims are rising. The legal bar is lower. The margin for error is shrinking. It’s now easy for anyone, regardless of background, to bring a discrimination claim as to how they’re treated,” she said. “[HR] needs to document why they’re doing things, tie it to a business rationale or a business need, or look at each employee separately into what their needs are and manage them there.”
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What can HR do? If multiple employees are reporting the same types of issues, HR pros should not be surprised, Muller said.
“Start to look at this data to help drive decisions in the workplace, to see what’s going on, to be able to track the trends, to be more predictive in what’s happening,” she said. “By the time something reaches an investigation, a lot of stuff has already happened in the organization that either the organization couldn’t see or they chose to ignore.”
For instance, if accommodation requests have spiked, it could indicate that HR needs to adjust their policies to become more flexible, or if reports of manager misconduct have gone up, it could signal that HR needs to take more preemptive measures in managerial training and oversight.
“Finance isn’t surprised when you miss the quarter. They’ve been tracking the trends when it’s happening. Marketing isn’t surprised when something peaks or valleys. They’ve been tracking the trends, so that’s what we need to be doing as well,” Muller said. Humans are human, and there’s behavior, and there’s indicators out there that something’s amiss…They can tell you what’s going on, if you have the data.”
