The New World of Work

The New World of Work is an invitation-only event. To request an invitation, please email [email protected] with your name, title, organization, and 250 words or less describing your role in addressing workplace harassment.

Day One: Thursday, March 18th

WELCOME AND INTRODUCTION

• Ally Coll, President and Co-Founder, The Purple Campaign

• Scott Westfahl, Director of Executive Education and Professor of Practice, Harvard Law School

I. PREVENT

TRANSPARENCY

Transparency helps prevent workplace harassment by creating shared norms, building trust, and demonstrating accountability. This session will address measures employers can take to communicate the company’s values and expectations for acceptable behavior transparently.

• Rob Chesnut, Former General Counsel and Chief Ethics Officer at Airbnb and Author of “Intentional Integrity: How Smart Companies Can Lead an Ethical Revolution.”

TRAINING

Anti-harassment training improves understanding about the type of conduct that is unacceptable in the workplace, but traditional approaches have been largely ineffective at rooting out the problem. This session will highlight the shortcomings of compliance-oriented trainings and showcase new creative solutions that can be applied in an increasingly dispersed workforce.

• Michael Marra, Co-Regional Managing Partner, Fisher Phillips LLP

• Dallas Thompson, Training Director, The Purple Method

II. RESPOND

REPORTING

Although employees are more physically distant, they may be even more hesitant to report workplace harassment, which remains a pervasive problem in the current work environment. Workers may feel isolated, unsure about how to report remotely, or fearful of retaliation in the midst of an economic recession. This session will address how employers can break down barriers to internal reporting and build trust with an increasingly remote workforce.

• Lynn Haaland, Deputy General Counsel and Chief Compliance & Ethics Officer, Zoom Video Communications

• Melinda Kimbro, Chief People Officer and Senior Vice President of People and Culture, Viasat, Inc.

FIRESIDE CHAT WITH AISHAH SHAHIDAH SIMMONS

Award-winning Black feminist lesbian documentary filmmaker, activist, author, cultural worker, international lecturer, and professor Aishah Shahidah Simmons will discuss her ground-breaking film NO! The Rape Documentary and follow-up  award-winning anthology Love WITH Accountability, providing insight into how institutions can better support survivors of sexual trauma. 

• Aishah Shahidah Simmons, Documentary Filmmaker, Author, Educator, and Activist

Day Two: Friday, March 19th

INVESTIGATIONS AND CORRECTIVE ACTION

When harassment occurs, organizations must conduct fair and thorough investigations and guarantee accountability, for both individual actors and the institution as a whole. This session will provide practical tips on how to conduct effective remote investigations and respond to incidents with corrective actions that are equitable, proportionate, and appropriate in the current work environment.

• Tarek Maassarani, Practitioner and Professor of Restorative Justice, Georgetown University Law Center

• Grace Speights, Chair, Global Labor & Employment Practice, Morgan Lewis 

• Tony West, Chief Legal Officer, Uber 

III. RETHINK

INTERSECTIONALITY 

Any comprehensive solution to workplace harassment must acknowledge and address the intersectionality of the problem—a term coined by Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw to explain how people who share one identity characteristic, such as race, may experience discrimination and subordination differently based on divergent intersecting identity categories. People often experience harassment on the basis of more than one identity group—for example, on the basis of race and gender, or ethnicity and religion.  This session will address steps organizations can take to address the intersectional nature of workplace harassment.

• Chief Justice Rebeca Martinez, Texas Fourth Court of Appeals

• Isra Bhatty, Attorney and Social Intervention Policy Expert

• Kim Forte, Director of Corporate Training and Development, The Phluid Project

• Anupa Iyer, Attorney and Senior Disability Policy Advisor, Bender Consulting Services

• Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Dean and Professor of Law, Boston University School of Law

DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION

While many organizations have been working to promote diversity and inclusion in the workplace, inequity remains a pervasive problem. Efforts to level the playing field won’t be successful unless employers understand and address the unprecedented challenges that employees are facing in the current climate. This session will highlight existing successful corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and provide expert insight into how current events are affecting how people show up to work.

• Amy Durrence, Director of Systems Change Initiatives, FreeFrom

• Molly Ford, Vice President, Global Equality Programs, Salesforce

• Dani McKenzie, Principal Inclusion Jedi, Amazon Games

IV. REBUILD

Corporate certification programs have been effectively used to create shared norms and expectations where traditional regulatory systems have failed, and the Purple Campaign is developing such a program to address workplace harassment. This session will provide an overview of the certification program and next steps on how organizations can participate.

• Ally Coll, President and Co-Founder, The Purple Campaign

• Chad Sniffen, Outreach Manager, National Sexual Violence Resource Center

• Janine Zweig, Associate Vice President for Justice Policy, Urban Institute