Combating Virtual Harassment In Remote Work

A team leader sends a junior colleague a “joke” on Teams at 11pm. A manager comments on what someone is wearing during a camera-on stand-up, then follows up in a private chat. Since COVID-19 moved so many people into remote work, this is what a lot of workplace bullying and harassment looks like. It followed people home. 

Ellen Pao, former interim CEO of Reddit and co-founder and CEO of Project Include, published a 2021 report on remote work harassment. Project Include surveyed 2,796 people in 48 countries between May 2020 and February 2021. Respondents reported more harassment based on gender, age and race or ethnicity since the pandemic began.

In the UK, a survey by Rights of Women of women who had been sexually harassed at work, run in late 2020, found that more than four in ten had experienced some or all of it online. Fifteen per cent said online harassment had increased while they were working from home. If your people work remotely even one day a week, a policy written for an office floor won’t keep a remote workplace safe and respectful.

Australian numbers point the same way. The Australian Human Rights Commission’s 2022 national survey, Time for respect, found that one in three workers had been sexually harassed at work in the previous five years. Fewer than one in five of them (18%) made a formal report or complaint.

The law has caught up. Since 12 December 2023, the Commission has been able to enforce the positive duty in the Sex Discrimination Act. The duty doesn’t depend on where people work. You have to take reasonable and proportionate measures to eliminate sexual harassment and sex-based discrimination in the workplace, and that covers the home office, the video call and the group chat. New Zealand employers have parallel duties under the Employment Relations Act 2000 and the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015.

What is virtual harassment?

If a comment would be harassment across a desk, it’s harassment in a Slack thread. Virtual harassment is unwelcome conduct, comments or actions, delivered through digital channels, that make work hostile or intimidating. A lot of it targets characteristics such as race, gender, religion or age.

People on the receiving end describe anxiety, distress and trouble concentrating. Harassers can face disciplinary action, dismissal or legal action. Preventing it is your job as the employer, whether your team sits in one office or across five time zones.

Types and forms of virtual harassment

Online harassment takes many forms, and most of them cause psychological distress. Some are obvious. Others look like ordinary work traffic until you see the pattern.

Common types of remote workplace harassment

Cyberbullying: Using email, chat or private messages to intimidate, threaten or humiliate a co-worker. Think of a manager tearing into someone in a team channel, or false rumours spread through direct messages.

Discriminatory comments: Discriminatory remarks about a person’s race, gender, age, religion or another protected attribute. A comment about a colleague’s accent or ethnicity during a video conference counts, even when it’s passed off as banter.

Cyberstalking: Following and monitoring a colleague across online platforms and social media until they feel threatened or unsafe. It might start with repeated friend requests and grow into messages from a second account. 

Invasion of privacy: Digging into a colleague’s personal life by tracking when they’re online, hunting for personal information, or using surveillance tools for no legitimate reason. It extends to instant messaging and social media, where a harasser might comment on or share a co-worker’s personal content in ways that make them uncomfortable.

Unsolicited sexually explicit content: Sending explicit photos, messages or videos to someone who didn’t ask for them. An image dropped into a WhatsApp chat or attached to an email is still sexual harassment when it comes from a colleague.

Sexual comments and advances: Suggestive comments or propositions sent through chat, private messages or video calls. Picture a colleague who keeps pushing for one-on-one video calls after being told the other person is uncomfortable.

Derogatory remarks and jokes: Offensive jokes or put-downs about gender, appearance or sexual orientation. Remarks about how someone looks on camera belong here, as do sexual comments made during a video call.

Online isolation: Deliberately leaving someone out of virtual meetings, group chats or shared workspaces. In an office, people notice who wasn’t invited. Remotely, the person left out may be the only one who knows.

Understanding virtual harassment in work-from-home and remote work contexts

Working from home raised the pressure on a lot of employees. In Project Include’s survey, almost two-thirds (64%) of respondents said their work hours had increased since COVID-19, and many felt they had to be online and available for their managers outside working hours. 

The report blamed poor communication practices and a focus on activity over productivity. Those same conditions make harassment easier. When remote workers are expected to respond on several platforms at all hours, the line between personal and work time blurs. A message at 10pm is hard to ignore, and harder to push back on. 

Why has workplace harassment increased despite remote work?

Without anyone in the room, some people use their power over more vulnerable colleagues. Much remote communication is unmonitored and unrecorded, or happens outside formal work systems on personal phones and private apps. Project Include respondents reported harassment more often over chat (45%), email (41%) and video meetings (41%) than in productivity tools (25%), where work is visible to the whole team. Harassers followed people across online spaces and went after them one-on-one.

Remote work also feels less formal. Some employees treat a chat app as a place where the usual workplace rules don’t apply. Text strips out tone, too, so a comment that would land as hostile across a desk can be passed off as a joke. Inappropriate messages become more common as a result. 

The realities of virtual harassment

Deloitte’s 2023 survey, Women at Work: A Global Outlook, asked 5,000 women in 10 countries about the previous year. Of those, 44% had experienced harassment or microaggressions, and women from under-represented groups, including women of colour and LGBT+ women, reported them more often. Project Include found that 26% of its respondents experienced more gender-based harassment during the pandemic and 10% more harassment based on race or ethnicity. Among workers aged 50 and over, 23% experienced an increase in age-based harassment and hostility.

Video-call nudity makes the headlines. Most examples of misconduct are quieter: remarks about someone’s appearance, manner or home, digs about their productivity, or arguments about their politics. Cameras also expose things people might have kept private, such as their children, partners and pets, which invites more microaggressions. Each one can look minor on its own, but repeated comments wear people down.

Where do we go from here?

Many businesses weren’t ready for remote workplace harassment. Without a policy on what’s acceptable in virtual communication, employees don’t know what to do when something makes them uncomfortable, and managers struggle to hold anyone to account. A good remote harassment policy defines harassment broadly enough to cover chat, video and social media. It sets out clear reporting channels and explains exactly what happens after a report comes in.

Practical steps to prevent online harassment in remote work

Online harassment prevention takes clear policies, training and follow-through. Here’s where to start:

Establish clear policies: Write a code of conduct that names online behaviour and remote working explicitly. Spell out what sexual harassment and online abuse look like, using examples from the tools your team uses every day.

Conduct training: Train employees and managers regularly on what online harassment is, what it leads to, and how to report it. Sexual harassment training for remote employees works best with realistic scenarios: the late-night direct message, the comment about someone’s video background, the joke in a group chat.

Foster a culture of inclusion: Make it normal to talk about online harassment. People need to know it’s safe to report sexual harassment and other abuse. Regular wellbeing check-ins help staff who rarely see colleagues in person.

Implement reporting mechanisms: Give people a confidential way to report online harassment, and more than one route to do it. HR should be one option, but some people won’t go to HR, especially when the harasser is senior. Dedicated whistleblowing software such as Elker lets people report anonymously if they choose and still answer follow-up questions through two-way messaging.

Encourage reporting: Make sure reporting misconduct never leads to retaliation. Tell employees their concerns will be taken seriously and kept confidential, then prove it in how you handle the first few reports.

Investigate promptly: When a complaint comes in, investigate quickly and act on what you find. Messages can be edited or deleted, so ask the person reporting to keep screenshots and message logs. How you respond tells everyone else whether online harassment is tolerated.

Provide trauma-informed support: Offer support to the people affected, such as EAP counselling or access to legal advice. Anyone who has experienced sexual harassment, discrimination or online abuse should feel protected and taken seriously throughout the process.

Legal compliance: Keep up with the laws that apply to you. In Australia, that means the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth), including the positive duty, and work health and safety laws, which treat sexual harassment as a psychosocial hazard. In New Zealand, check your policies against the Employment Relations Act 2000 and the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015. Review your procedures whenever the law changes.

Monitor trends: Watch your own reports for patterns, such as the same team, manager or channel coming up again and again.

Adapt and improve: Review your prevention measures regularly. Use feedback, incident data and changes in how your people work to decide what to fix.

None of these steps is complicated. Taken together, they reduce the risk of harassment and give remote staff the same protection they would expect in an office.