Back in 1996, employment lawyer Karen Michael was added to a new case. Several women were suing their employer, her client, after being sexually harassed by one of their coworkers. The women had expressed their grievances through the company’s workplace survey, but the company had failed to notice.
“They did nothing with that information,” Michael remembers. “I had to look at all of these surveys and, sure enough, there it was. Multiple women had commented they were being sexually harassed by this man, and under federal law, that’s notice.”
She wondered, how could all these alarming survey responses have been so blatantly ignored? The case inspired Michael to take a public stance against unreviewed workplace surveys.
Flash-forward to May 15, 2024, and Michael posted a video of herself discussing the topic to TikTok. “Do not do an employee survey, if you’re going to do nothing with the information you get,” she laments. Today, the video has 2.8 million views and the comment section is full of survey horror stories.
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