One of the clearest signs of a weak succession system is an employee who cannot be promoted because nobody else can do their job.

I’ve heard versions of this many times. “She’s too critical to the team.” “Nobody else knows that process.” “The client trusts her.” “Let’s wait until we have someone who can take over.”

The manager usually means it as praise. But there is a point at which being indispensable stops being a compliment and becomes a career constraint. If someone is too important to move, the problem may not be their readiness. It may be the organisation’s dependence on them.

How reliability turns into dependence

High performers accumulate dependence. They know how things work, remember what happened last time, rescue difficult client relationships and step in when a colleague is struggling. They become the person a manager calls when something has gone wrong.

After a while, reliability becomes part of the infrastructure. Then the organisation looks at their development plan and says they need more strategic exposure. Of course they do. But they are still carrying everything that made them indispensable in the first place.

Development plans that only add work

When I ask managers what a strong employee needs to do next, there is rarely a shortage of ideas. Lead a larger project. Take on another stakeholder. Mentor someone. Present to the executive team.

What I want to know is what the person will stop doing. If someone already carries six major responsibilities and we add a seventh in the name of development, we have expanded the workload without building the capability the next role requires.

There is a difference between more work and a different kind of responsibility. Three more projects test capacity. Deciding which project gets resources first tests judgement. Building a team that can deliver without your direct involvement tests leadership. A stretch assignment should prepare someone for the next role, not simply prove they can carry more.

Someone has to take the work over

If we want someone to move into a broader role, somebody else must learn their current responsibilities. There may be mistakes in the handover. A client may notice. A manager may have to coach someone who doesn’t yet know everything. That inconvenience is real, and it is necessary.

I’ve sat in talent discussions where everyone agrees someone is ready, and then the conversation stalls on one sentence: “But who will do what she does now?”

That sentence tells us we have developed the individual without developing the system around her. If no one can take over a critical responsibility, that is a succession risk. It should not become a reason to keep the high performer where she is. It should become a reason to build the capacity that lets her move.

Plan the move backwards from the next role

Start with the role she is moving towards. What decisions will she need to make? What relationships will she manage? What will she delegate? Where will she need authority rather than expertise?

Then look at her current role and identify what has to change so she can begin building those experiences. Some responsibilities will have to move. Some authority will have to be given. Some mistakes will have to be tolerated. The organisation may feel less efficient for a while, and waiting for the perfect replacement is not always the answer.

A high performer should not have to remain indispensable in order to remain valued. The question for leaders is not only whether someone is ready for the next role. It is whether the organisation has built enough capacity for her to leave the role she has already mastered.

Link – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-your-best-employee-becomes-too-valuable-move-sonica-d2buc/

We have become very good at telling women what to do differently at work. Speak up more. Be more visible. Build stronger networks. Ask for the promotion.

There is value in helping people build these skills, and I have worked with many women who benefited from learning to advocate for themselves. The problem starts when confidence becomes the explanation for a much larger organisational pattern.

When a woman has done strong work for years and isn’t progressing, the conversation quickly turns to her. Before we have it, we should look at what came before it.

How assignments become evidence

Take two people at the same level, both rated as strong performers.

One is given the difficult client because her manager thinks she’s ready. She starts attending senior meetings, presents to leadership and eventually leads a cross-functional project.

The other becomes the person everyone relies on to get internal work out the door, because she is exceptionally dependable. Her work is strong, but it happens largely behind the scenes.

Twelve months later, one has a stronger story about strategic thinking and stakeholder management. The other has a strong record of delivery. We describe the first as having broader experience.

But that experience didn’t appear by itself. Someone decided who would take the client, represent the team and lead the project when the stakes were high. We call these staffing decisions. They are also career decisions, and managers make hundreds of them without thinking of them as talent development.

Why the gap widens without anyone intending it

I have seen the same people receive career-building opportunities repeatedly because they have already shown they can handle them. From the manager’s side, the decision is sensible. From a systems side, it creates a loop: people who have had opportunities look more experienced, and that experience makes them easier to choose again.

Nobody has to consciously exclude anyone for this to happen. A series of individually reasonable decisions can produce a very consistent outcome.

Why we default to fixing the person

It is easier to send someone to a leadership workshop than to ask a manager why the same three people keep getting the most visible assignments. Mentoring and visibility goals may help. But if a person has never been given a senior-facing assignment, we should be careful about telling her she needs more senior visibility.

Questions for your next talent review

A talent review looks at the end of a process. It should also look at how the evidence was built:

• Who has had access to commercially important work?

• Who has managed senior stakeholders or made decisions with consequences?

• Who has been sponsored for a stretch assignment?

• Who has spent years being called dependable and kept on execution-heavy work?

None of this removes individual accountability. If someone needs stronger influencing skills, say so and help her build them. But there is a difference between asking someone to develop a capability and withholding the experience through which it can be demonstrated.

A better development question

“What does she need to develop?” is a fair question, but it shouldn’t be the only one. We should also ask: “What experience does she need next, and who will create access to it?”

Before we ask a woman to become more confident, perhaps we should ask whether we have given her enough opportunities to look ready.

Link – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/we-keep-telling-women-more-confident-looking-right-sonica-k4crc/

Take two women with essentially the same qualifications. Give one of them a career break, and she is 49% less likely to get a callback.

That number should make us uncomfortable, particularly because so much of the conversation around women returning to work still starts with what she needs to do to become employable again.

Get certified. Refresh your skills. Build confidence. Complete a course. Do a returnship. Make the resume stronger.

All useful things, in the right context.

But recent research from India suggests something more complicated is happening: when an upskilling signal was added to the resume, the callback gap barely changed.

And that makes me wonder whether we have spent years trying to fix the wrong side of the problem.

The finding that should make us rethink the intervention

What really caught my attention was what happened when researchers added an upskilling signal to the resume, such as a recent certification or course.

The callback rate barely moved.

That matters because so much of what we have built around women’s return to work is based on the assumption that the break has created a skills deficit which the woman needs to repair before employers will consider her seriously.

We have returnship programmes, market-readiness bootcamps, certification pathways, confidence-building workshops and a whole vocabulary around helping women become “job ready” again.

These interventions can absolutely be useful, particularly when someone has been away from the workplace for several years and wants to rebuild confidence, reconnect with professional networks or get familiar with tools and practices that have changed.

But if adding a recent certification to an otherwise comparable resume does little to change the employer’s response, then we need to be honest about what these programmes can and cannot solve.

Perhaps the problem is not sitting entirely on the candidate side of the equation.

So what might actually be driving the penalty?

If a skills signal doesn’t significantly change the outcome, the pattern starts to look much more like an employer perception problem.

And the way that penalty varies across sectors is particularly interesting.

The disadvantage appears stronger in skill-intensive, high-stakes fields such as finance than in areas such as HR, where broader competencies and experience may carry more weight.

If employers were primarily worried about technical skills becoming outdated, you would expect a recent certification or course to do more of the work of reassuring them.

Instead, the penalty appears to become stronger in environments where employers may also be making assumptions about commitment, continuity and whether someone who has taken a career break will stay.

That is a very different problem from skill currency.

A career break can become a shortcut for making assumptions about a woman’s future commitment to work, her availability, her ambitions or how likely she is to leave again, even when there is very little evidence in the application itself to support those assumptions.

And then there is the question of where you are hiring

The fact that the penalty appears larger in smaller firms and in regions where diversity practices are less established is also worth paying attention to.

A lot of hiring still happens through informal judgement.

We talk about structured hiring, competency frameworks and objective criteria, but in many organisations there is still a significant amount of decision-making that sounds like, “I don’t know if she will fit,” “I’m not sure how committed she is,” or “Why did she take such a long break?”

Those statements can feel like reasonable hiring concerns because they are framed as assessments of future risk.

But sometimes they are simply assumptions dressed up as judgement.

And a resume cannot do much to counter an assumption that the evaluator has already made about the person behind it.

There is one group we should be paying much more attention to

I find the experience of women returning to their own organisations particularly interesting here.

When a woman takes a career break and later returns to the same organisation, the organisation already has something the external employer doesn’t: evidence.

It knows how she worked, what she delivered, how she handled responsibility and what she contributed before she left.

The break still happened, but the person isn’t an unknown quantity.

That tells us something important about where some of the difficulty may actually lie.

The risk employers perceive may have less to do with the career break itself and much more to do with what they imagine about someone they don’t yet know.

Which is why I think organisations should be asking a very practical question: what are we doing with the women who already know us, and whom we already know?

Do we keep in touch with women who leave for a career break?

Do we have an alumni network that is actually used rather than simply existing on paper?

Do managers know which former employees might be interested in returning?

Do our talent teams actively look at former employees when roles open up, rather than starting every search from scratch?

Do we have a process for reaching out to women who left on good terms and may now be ready to come back?

These are relatively simple questions, and yet most organisations have no systematic answer to them.

Where I think the intervention needs to move

We should absolutely continue investing in returnships and upskilling where they genuinely help women rebuild confidence, capability and professional connections.

At the same time, we need to spend equal energy examining what happens on the other side of the hiring table.

Ask hiring managers what concerns come to mind when they see a career break on a resume, and then ask whether those concerns are based on evidence about the candidate or assumptions about people who have taken breaks.

Build structured evaluation criteria that make it harder for “commitment” or “fit” to become vague proxies for personal assumptions, particularly in the early screening stages where a candidate can be rejected before anyone has actually spoken to her.

Track callback, interview and offer rates for candidates with career breaks against comparable candidates without them, because if we don’t measure where the drop-off happens, we are left guessing about where the problem sits.

And perhaps most importantly, stop making the entire return-to-work conversation about how women can make themselves easier for employers to say yes to.

The data is telling us something we should take seriously. We keep asking women to become more ready for the workplace.

Maybe some of our organisations need to become more ready to recognise the value of someone whose career hasn’t followed a perfectly uninterrupted line.

Link – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/career-break-penalty-isnt-just-skills-problem-aron-she-her-hers–6aorc/

We hear the words “career break” and start thinking “family over career”

It happens unconsciously in hiring conversations.

A woman has been away from work for a few years, and before anyone asks what she wants next, people start thinking about balance, flexibility and whether she would really want the pressure of a senior role again.

The intention may be kind, but the assumption can be limiting.

Because a woman taking time away from work tells us that she took a break. It doesn’t tell us that she wants less responsibility or is less ambitious when she comes back.

Yet that distinction can get lost surprisingly early in the hiring process, shaping the roles, designations and compensation that are put in front of her.

And the data suggests we should be questioning that assumption much more seriously.

The Assumption Doesn’t Match the Data

Financial security drives 38% of women back to work. Another 38% want to apply their education, the qualification sitting unused while they were away. 22% percent want to make better use of their skills specifically. These aren’t the stated priorities of someone looking to downshift. These are the stated priorities of someone who paused, and now wants back in, fully, not at a discount or as a good to do initiative.

And Then We offer Less

Here’s where the assumption does real damage. Returning women are routinely placed into roles below their prior seniority, “fewer than half,” by one recent estimate, land anything that matches their actual experience level. Nearly 40% take a pay cut or a role downgrade on the way back in. If you assume she wants less, you’ll happily offer her less, and call it thoughtful accommodation rather than what it often actually is: underplacement, dressed up as flexibility.

Who Gets Considered for the Bigger Roles?

It gets sharper in technical fields.

Women are relatively well represented in returnship programs in functions like People & Culture, Legal, Marketing. They are far less represented in engineering, product, or information security. It is not because the capability does not exist. It is because returnship programs are seen as a second chance and hence more suitable for support roles, and not senior strategic or business roles.

It’s simply easier to slot someone back into a “softer” function than to make the case for her in a technical leadership seat. Easier for the organisation. Not necessarily right for her.

Start With the Question

Ask what she wants directly, rather than inferring it from the fact that she took a break. Some women genuinely do want reduced scope for a period, and that’s a completely legitimate choice, one that should be offered honestly, not smuggled in as the default.

Others want exactly what they had, or more, and the organisation’s job is to build the case for putting them there, not to quietly decide on their behalf that they’d probably prefer something smaller.

The most respectful thing an organisation can do here isn’t offering flexibility. It’s asking plainly instead of assuming.

Link – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/have-we-asked-her-what-she-wants-sonica-aron-she-her-hers–uzwhc/

Ninety-three percent of Indian men between 25 and 60 participate in the labour force while, Twenty-seven percent of women do.

And that’s not a small gap.

This indicates most of the adult female population of the country sitting outside the labour market.

We talk endlessly about getting women back to work. We talk much less about why roughly a third of them left the formal workforce in the first place, often into informal work or unpaid domestic roles and what was actually happening at home while that decision got made.

The math nobody puts on a slide

Indian women spend, on average, 299 minutes a day on unpaid domestic work. Men spend 97. That’s not a rounding error, it’s a second, unpaid, full-time-adjacent job stacked on top of whatever paid work she’s trying to excel at, and competing with her male counterparts for the next promotion. And unlike many Western economies, India’s childcare infrastructure is still overwhelmingly home-based, run by family or by domestic help, rather than regulated daycare. Which means the whole arrangement depends on one person being available and reliable. When that person isn’t, and eventually, someone usually isn’t, it’s the mother who steps back, not because she wants less, but because the system has exactly one shock absorber, and it’s her.

The resignation is rarely the actual decision point

Here’s what tends to get missed when we only look at the resignation letter.

By the time someone formally quits, she has usually already quietly renegotiated her own role for months, sometimes years before that. She stopped raising her hand for the stretch project. She let the international trip go to someone else. She started leaving at six instead of eight, and nobody in leadership noticed because her output on paper didn’t visibly change yet.

The resignation is the end of a long invisible negotiation, not the start of one, and organisations that only start paying attention at the exit interview have missed every earlier point where a different conversation might have changed the outcome.

Why “returnship” already frames this wrong

Here’s what bothers me about how we frame the whole conversation. “Return to work” quietly implies she went somewhere else, on her own terms, and now needs help finding her way back. What actually happened, for a huge number of these women, is that an unequal division of unpaid labour made continuing to work practically unworkable, and she was the one who absorbed the cost. That’s not a career choice in any meaningful sense. That’s a structural failure showing up as an individual decision.

What this means for organisations, specifically

If the exit is structural, the return can’t be purely individual either.

A returnship programme that only addresses her, skills, confidence, network, while leaving the underlying arithmetic of unpaid work completely untouched, is solving half the problem and calling it done.

What would the other half actually look like?

Real, flexible childcare support, not a token creche most companies never staff properly. Manager training on recognising when someone’s quietly absorbing a caregiving crisis long before she resigns, so the conversation happens at month one, not at the exit interview. And a genuine look at whether your organisation’s “flexibility” policies exist on paper or actually get used without penalty, because a policy nobody dares use isn’t a policy, it’s a decoration.

The question we should be asking before the interview

Before we ask whether she’s ready to return, maybe we ask something earlier: did we do anything, while she was still here, to make leaving less likely to have been the only option available to her? Most organisations have never actually asked that question about their own attrition data. It’s uncomfortable, because the honest answer, more often than we’d like, is no.

Link – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/before-we-talk-returning-lets-why-she-left-sonica-aron-she-her-hers–rivrc/

I’ve been looking at a lot of research on women returning to work and the more I put the findings next to each other, the harder it becomes to keep asking the same question we have been asking for years: are we ready to welcome them, in full honesty?

Because let us look at what the research is actually telling us.

The situation that pushed many women out in the first place was often systemic issues, rather than a question of individual resilience or ambition. And even after a return is celebrated, the career setbacks can quietly show up again over the next couple of years.

Each finding tells us something on its own.

Put them together, and I think they tell us something bigger about where we have been looking for the problem.

Maybe we have been asking the wrong question

For years, we have asked whether women are ready to return to work.

Are their skills current enough? Are they confident enough? Are they comfortable with the pace? Will they be able to manage the demands of the role? Will they stay?

Those are all questions organisations are entitled to think about when making hiring decisions, but the research makes me wonder why so many of those questions seem to get asked of women returning from a career break with an intensity that we don’t always apply to other candidates.

If upskilling barely changes callback rates, then the barrier isn’t sitting entirely in what she brings to the table.

If structured interviews narrow the gap significantly compared with unstructured hiring, then how we evaluate people is clearly part of the equation.

And if a woman’s career progression starts to flatten in the eighteen or twenty-four months after a much-celebrated return, then getting her through the door was only one part of the problem.

The hiring decision may have changed her employment status without necessarily changing the conditions that determine whether she will actually progress.

There is a fair point on the other side

Of course, organisations have to think about flexibility.

Of course, people’s circumstances change, and a woman returning after a career break may want a different working arrangement, a different pace, or a different kind of role.

There is nothing wrong with asking.

The problem starts when we answer the question before she has had the chance to.

A career break can become shorthand for assumptions about availability, ambition, commitment, and appetite for responsibility, and those assumptions can quietly shape the role, the salary, the seniority, and even whether she gets through the first round of screening.

That is the pattern I keep coming back to across the research.

The judgment is often being made before the evidence is available.

How about we retire the idea of a “second chance?”

I understand why organisations use the phrase. It is usually meant positively, as a way of acknowledging that returning to work after a long break can be difficult.

But I have always found “second chance” a little uncomfortable.

A woman who has spent several years raising children, caring for a parent, managing a household, or simply stepping away from paid work has not stopped being capable, experienced, or ambitious simply because those things weren’t being recorded on a CV.

She has been doing work that our labour market often doesn’t know how to value because it doesn’t fit neatly into a job title, a promotion history, or a salary progression.

So when she returns, I don’t think the conversation should begin with how generous we are being by giving her another opportunity.

It should begin with what she can contribute now, what she wants to do next, and how the organisation can make a fair assessment of that.

What usually happens after the welcome-back email

This is the part I think organisations need to pay much more attention to.

We are getting better at talking about the moment of return: the returnship, the re-entry programme, the hiring campaign, the announcement about women coming back into the workforce.

But what happens six months later?

Who is giving her meaningful work?

Who is putting her name forward for the stretch assignment?

Who is advocating for her when promotion discussions happen?

Who is making sure she is visible to the people making succession and talent decisions?

Because sponsorship doesn’t happen automatically just because someone has successfully returned.

And if we only measure how many women return, we can end up celebrating a programme that looks successful on day one while missing what happens to those women eighteen months later.

The pattern across all five findings is actually quite simple

When I look across these findings, what stands out to me is how often structure changes the outcome.

A structured interview leaves less room for an evaluator’s assumptions to determine who gets through.

A known internal returner is judged with the benefit of an existing track record rather than an imagined one.

Someone who is actively sponsored has an advocate in the room when decisions about visibility and progression are being made.

A return programme that tracks people beyond the first placement can actually see whether the intervention worked, rather than assuming success because someone got hired.

Bias doesn’t always arrive as an obviously discriminatory decision.

Sometimes it looks like an interviewer making an assumption because there is no structure to challenge it. Sometimes it looks like a role being scoped around what someone is presumed to want. Sometimes it looks like nobody putting a returning woman forward because everyone assumes she is still settling back in.

That is why structure matters.

It makes the assumptions visible, gives people something against which to test their judgement, and creates accountability for what happens after the initial decision.

Perhaps the question needs to change

We have spent a lot of time asking whether women are ready to return.

Perhaps organisations should spend some of that time asking a different set of questions.

Are we evaluating returning candidates against the same criteria as everyone else?

Do our hiring processes give unconscious assumptions enough room to influence who gets through?

Are we asking women what kind of role they actually want, rather than deciding that for them?

Do we have sponsorship mechanisms that continue after the offer letter?

And are we measuring what happens to women two years after they return, rather than stopping at the point where the programme looks good on paper?

Because returning to work is only the beginning. The more useful question now may be whether our organisations are ready to receive women whose careers have not followed a perfectly linear path, recognise what they bring and give them the same room to grow once they are back.

Link – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/women-ready-return-organisations-receive-them-aron-she-her-hers–oythc/

Every year, organisations across India report POSH training completion rates of 95% and above, and treat that number as evidence that their people are prepared. A completion certificate proves someone sat through a slide deck. It does not prove they would recognise harassment the moment it actually shows up in front of them. In my work with organisations across sectors, I have almost never seen anyone check the difference between those two things.

The pattern is familiar. Ninety minutes, once a year, a sign-off sheet at the end. It satisfies the awareness requirement under the Act, on paper. That is exactly the problem. It was built to satisfy a requirement, not to change what someone does the moment they witness something ambiguous.

This is a memory problem, not a motivation problem

Sit in on a session six weeks after the annual training and you see it immediately. Ask people what the Act requires and most can answer. Ask them what they would do if a colleague made a remark in a team meeting that landed badly on one person and nobody else appeared to notice, and the room goes quiet.

That silence is not indifference. Most people genuinely want to do the right thing. The problem is that passive learning does not survive contact with a real situation. A century of replicated research on the forgetting curve puts the loss at roughly 70% of new information within twenty-four hours, unless the learner has actively engaged with it rather than watched it go by. What we see in the field matches that almost exactly.

The end-of-module quiz hides the gap well. Picking the correct answer from four options is recognition. It says nothing about whether someone would recognise the situation itself, three weeks later, arriving with none of the clean signposting a training scenario provides.

Real harassment does not look like the textbook example. It is an ambiguous comment that could be read two ways. A pattern that only becomes obvious on the third instance. A senior person’s behaviour that gets a charitable read because of who they are.

The manager in the room needs something entirely different

There is a second gap, and it is arguably the bigger one.

A manager who receives an informal disclosure over coffee needs to know something completely different from an employee filling out an annual acknowledgement form. What to say in the first ninety seconds. What can and cannot be promised. When the matter has to be escalated regardless of what the employee is asking for. How to hold the trust of someone who has just taken an enormous personal risk.

Almost no standard programme separates these two audiences. Everyone sits through the same deck. The group carrying the hardest judgment call in the entire system walks out with exactly the same preparation as everyone else. And then we are surprised when a well-meaning manager promises a retribution that  they were never in a position to give.

Rehearse judgment, not recall

Aviation solved a version of this decades ago. Not by making the safety briefing longer, but by moving the decision into a simulator. You do not train a pilot for turbulence by having them read about it. You put them in a situation where they have to choose, and you let them get it wrong somewhere it costs nothing.

Scenario-based training works on the same principle. Give people the ambiguous comment, not the obvious one. Make them decide out loud, in front of peers who will disagree. Let them discover in a training room, rather than in a live case, that their instinct was to wait and see.

For managers, rehearse the disclosure conversation itself. Role-play the first ninety seconds. It is uncomfortable, and the discomfort is the entire point, because discomfort is what the memory attaches to.

None of this asks for more time in the calendar. It asks that the ninety minutes you have already planned be spent with more clarity on the outcomes.

The honest audit question

So the question for any HR leader is not whether the training is compliant.

It almost certainly is.

The question is whether anyone has ever tested what the people who sat through it would actually do on the day they actually witnessed something inappropriate.

Compliance is the floor, not the finish line. Measure what people would do, not what they attended. And build the programme for the moment it matters, not for the sign-off sheet.

Link – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/your-training-completion-rate-measuring-wrong-thing-sonica-n9pnc/

Most HR teams put real thought into the Internal committee training. Far less thought goes into how long members serve, what happens at handover, who ends up sitting in that room at all.

In my work with organisations across sectors, composition turns out to matter more than curriculum.

Two failure modes, and most organisations have already chosen one by accident

Consider a committee that turns over completely every year.

Nobody recognises a name that has come up before. Nobody notices that a pattern in one function mirrors something that surfaced in another two years ago, because the person who would have made that connection rotated off before the second instance came up. Every case is treated as the first case, because for that committee, it is.

Now flip it. A committee that never turns over runs into the opposite problem. Give people enough time in the role and familiarity with how the business really works starts shaping what reads as concerning and what reads as just how things are done here. Nobody deliberately decides to look the other way. It happens slowly, and it happens to good people.

Both of these are decisions the organisation has already made, by default. Someone set the term length once, when the committee was first constituted, and nobody has touched it since.

A committee with no memory cannot see a pattern. A committee with no turnover stops recognising one.

This has stopped being a quality problem

For years, this was a question of how well individual cases were handled. It is now closer to an evidentiary one.

Under the Companies Act, every company already reports cases filed, disposed of and pending in its Board’s Report. For the top 1,000 listed companies by market capitalisation, SEBI’s BRSR framework requires the same numbers under Principle 5, with the previous year’s figures set alongside for comparison.

That comparative column is the whole point. A board signing off on those numbers is vouching, whether it realises it or not, for the competence of whatever produced them. And the moment two years sit side by side, the question stops being “was this complaint handled correctly” and becomes “did the organisation see what was building.”

A committee with no institutional memory cannot answer that. Not because anyone did anything wrong, but because the information was never held anywhere it could be found again.

Three fixes, none of which need a change in the law

Stagger the terms. Two-year terms, with members rotating off at different points, so the committee never turns over all at once. Memory survives without the group calcifying around a single worldview.

Write a handover note. Short, anonymised, from the outgoing members to the incoming ones. What kinds of cases came from where. What escalated fast. What the last group wishes it had caught sooner. Right now that knowledge walks out of the building with the people who leave.

Set a composition rule. No more than two members from the same function. An external member who is genuinely rotated, not the same name renewed for six years running. A committee drawn too narrowly develops exactly the blind spots of the business it is meant to be checking.

None of this is expensive. All of it is structural, which is precisely why it gets skipped. Nobody’s annual goals contain the phrase “committee term length.”

The test

Build the committee this way, and two years from now it can answer the question a board or a tribunal might actually ask.

Build it on defaults, and you will not find out that it cannot until someone asks.

Train the committee well. Then build it so that what it learns outlives the people who learned it.

Link – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nobodys-annual-goals-say-committee-term-length-aron-she-her-hers–ludxc/

Ask most people what stops a colleague from saying something when they witness harassment, and the answer is usually some version of, “I didn’t have the courage.” or “It was not my place to do or say anything.”

I think we have been too comfortable with these explanations. The obvious organisational response is to tell people to be braver, speak up and do the right thing, while missing the much more practical question of whether we have actually equipped them to know what to do when faced with a situation.

The real barrier is often not knowing what to do

In my experience of working with organisations on workplace culture and POSH, one of the things that becomes clear very quickly is how differently people imagine bystander intervention when they are discussing it in a training room versus when they are faced with an uncomfortable situation in real life.

In a training room, “speak up” sounds straightforward.

In the moment, it can mean making a decision in a few seconds about whether to say something in front of everyone, whether to interrupt what is happening, whether to speak to the person privately afterwards, whether to tell a manager or HR, whether the Internal Committee needs to know, and whether stepping in might create a bigger problem for the person involved or for themselves.

Most employees have never been given enough clarity on these choices to make that decision with confidence.

So they hesitate.

And when you add the discomfort of everyone else being present, uncertainty about what they have actually witnessed, the possibility of getting it wrong and the fear of becoming involved in something that could have consequences for them, hesitation can very quickly become silence.

That is why the gap between what people say they would do and what they actually do is worth paying attention to.

A person can genuinely believe that harassment should be challenged, genuinely want to support a colleague and still freeze when they encounter it, because wanting to intervene and knowing how to intervene are two different capabilities.

What gets in the way is usually more complicated than courage

There is the fear of retaliation, particularly when the person involved has more power, influence or social standing than the person who witnesses the behaviour.

There is also the social risk of being perceived as someone who overreacts, creates trouble or cannot take a joke, and I have seen how powerful that fear can be even in organisations that genuinely believe they have created a speak-up culture.

Then there is the question that sits underneath almost every difficult situation: Did I actually see what I think I saw?

A comment may have been inappropriate, a conversation may have crossed a line, someone may have looked visibly uncomfortable, but the observer may still be unsure whether they have enough context to act.

That uncertainty is important because it creates an easy exit: perhaps I misunderstood, perhaps it was a joke, perhaps someone else will say something, perhaps it is not my place.

When several people in the same room are having that internal conversation at the same time, silence can look like collective agreement when it is actually collective uncertainty.

We need to make bystander intervention more practical

This is where I think a lot of bystander training still has room to improve.

We are quite good at explaining why intervention matters, but we need to spend much more time helping people understand the different ways in which intervention can happen, because expecting every employee to confront inappropriate behaviour directly is neither realistic nor appropriate for every situation.

There may be moments when a direct comment is the right response, while in another situation quietly interrupting what is happening can be more effective; sometimes the most useful thing a colleague can do is check in with the person privately afterwards, and sometimes the responsible action is to take the concern to someone who has the authority to address it.

The important thing is that employees understand these choices before they need to make them, including what they can say, whom they can approach, what information is useful to share and what happens after they raise a concern.

And this is where rehearsal matters. It helps build muscle memory.

If we want people to act differently in uncomfortable moments, we cannot rely entirely on awareness created during a training session; people need opportunities to think through scenarios, practise possible responses and understand that intervention can take different forms depending on the context.

The goal is to make the path from “Something doesn’t feel right” to “I know what I can do next” much shorter.

Because when we look at bystander silence only through the lens of courage, we risk asking employees to overcome a personal failing that may not exist, while leaving an organisational capability gap completely untouched.

People may already care deeply about what happens around them.

Link – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/problem-telling-bystanders-just-speak-up-sonica-aron-she-her-hers–fqvcc/

In early days of my career, I recall a very senior leader who every one loved. His successes were spoken about. They were anecdotes on what he did ion that one meeting were repeated. His year or year achievements were something the whole business relied on.

But there was another set of stories brewing at a deeper level. The inappropriate jokes, the public flirtatious behaviour, the favourite female team member each quarter. Considered as rumours, people laughed about it, until one day, a real complaint dropped. I still remember the hushed, serious and baffled faces in the senior management around those days.

Every workplace has one like this: the manager who is considered a great achiever, someone everyone genuinely likes, the person who is generous with credit, remembers birthdays, makes time for juniors and is often life of every celebration.

So when a complaint eventually names that person, the first reaction in the room is not, “Let’s understand what happened.” It is more likely be a version of, “That doesn’t sound like him,” said with genuine conviction by people who are not necessarily trying to protect anyone, but who have spent enough time experiencing the person’s warmth, generosity and leadership of that person. To them, the allegation feels inconsistent with the person they know.

Why likeability (and achievements) changes what we are willing to see?

I have seen how quickly a strong positive impression of someone can start influencing the way everything else about them is interpreted, particularly when the information in front of us is uncomfortable or ambiguous.

The manager who is known for being supportive, stays late with a junior colleague, and people assume there was a perfectly legitimate reason; the manager who regularly messages their team at night sends a message at 11 pm, and it is seen as work ethic rather than an intrusion; a comment that might have made people uncomfortable coming from someone else is explained away because, “That’s just not how he meant it.”

The interesting part is that none of this usually feels like bias to the people doing it, because they are drawing on their own genuine experiences with that person, and those experiences matter to them.

The problem begins when those experiences become a mental road map for examining what has been reported.

This is particularly difficult in POSH because the person at the centre of a complaint may have spent years building trust, relationships and goodwill within the organisation, and that goodwill does not simply disappear when a complaint is made. In fact, it can become the lens through which everyone starts interpreting the complaint itself.

The better the reputation, the stronger the instinct to question the complainant or to mitigate the allegation.

The impact of this on the person who complained

The impact on the complainant can be much deeper than simply feeling that people do not believe her.

When a room starts looking for reasons why the complaint cannot be true, the complainant can gradually become positioned as the person who is the trouble maker, has disrupted the team, questioned someone everyone respects, or created a problem where others previously saw none.

That changes the environment around her. The lack of a bias free hearing and investigation can have far reaching impact.

People who might otherwise have spoken about something they experienced may become more hesitant, because they have already seen where the room’s sympathies lie. Colleagues may choose to stay out of it, conversations become quieter, and the complainant can find herself carrying not only the difficulty of making a complaint but also the weight of having challenged someone who is socially well regarded.

This is where organisational culture matters enormously, because people watch what happens when someone raises a concern against a senior well liked person, and they remember it.

This breaks the pattern

I have never found much comfort in policy language that simply tells people to treat everyone equally, because most people sincerely believe they are capable of doing that until they are faced with a situation where their own relationships and impressions are involved.

What makes a difference is a process that is consistent enough to hold its ground when those instincts show up: the same seriousness, the same timelines, the same standards of inquiry and the same willingness to examine uncomfortable information regardless of how senior, popular or trusted the person involved happens to be.

For an Internal Committee, this also means developing the self-awareness to recognise that instinctive reaction of, “But I know him, he would never do this,” and understand that it is something to examine rather than something to rely on.

Link – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/good-reputation-can-make-complaint-harder-hear-aron-she-her-hers–fxypc/

Ninety-eight percent training completion.

A fully constituted Internal Committee. Zero complaints this year. Leadership teams present these three numbers together with real pride (and nothing wrong in that), and together they’re meant to say: we are safe here.

But that need not be the reality. What these numbers show is that the company followed a checklist.

Two numbers worth reading together

Complaints across India’s listed companies have nearly tripled between FY22 and FY25, IT services and banking alone accounting for roughly two-thirds of all cases among the country’s largest firms.

Meanwhile, one assessment of India’s PoSH Act enforcement puts implementation at just 34 out of 100.

These two numbers read together demonstrate a slow yet growing trust in the POSH mechanism. This isn’t simply harassment rising. It might be a signal that people are, for the first time in many workplaces, choosing to trust the POSH mechanism, colliding with the implementation layer that that has not been built in terms of capacity and capability.

Zero complaints which means nothing

Let’s acknowledge one truth: the workplace people actually trust is not the one with the fewest complaints. A company with zero complaints could mean a genuinely safe workplace. It could just as easily mean people have quietly concluded the mechanism doesn’t work, so why bother. I’ve seen both kinds of organisation up close. On paper, they look identical. On floor, you can feel the vibe.

So what should we measure that gives a real picture?

So what should replace complaint counts and training completion rates? Five things I’d put in front of any board serious about this.

Resolution timelines. What share of cases actually close within the statutory ninety-day window? A system that misses its own deadlines is telling people not to use it.

Internal Committee composition, specifically whether the external member’s seat stays filled. A vacant external seat is a structural defect most annual reports never disclose.

Leaders and Managers specific training completion, tracked separately from the all-employee number. That separation is usually where the real gaps hide.

The quality of annual reports, the detailing and the transparency.

And recurrence: do the same names keep showing up as respondents, and were the interim measures and recommendations an IC recommended ever actually implemented? A flat complaint number will never show you that pattern.

The metric which will actually surprise a board

There’s a sixth metric I’d add and it’s the one that tends to make a room go quiet: attrition among women in year two to four of tenure, plotted against complaint volume for the same period. In a company with genuinely low trust, you’ll often see attrition in that band running well above the rest of the workforce, with almost no corresponding rise in complaints. Nobody’s filing anything. They’re just leaving, quietly, and citing ‘personal reasons’ on the way out, better opportunity, family reasons, whatever keeps the exit interview short. I’ve sat through more than one of these exit interviews myself, watching a woman give every answer except the real one, because by that point she’s already decided the system won’t work. That gap, high attrition, low formal complaints, is a far more honest signal than either number alone, and almost nobody puts the two on the same slide.

What this metric costs you to do

None of these are hard to track and monitor. It just requires looking past the numbers that make us comfortable, toward the numbers that tell you that something needs to be done. That’s the real meaning of moving beyond compliance. It isn’t a values statement about culture. It’s a decision to govern this the way you’d govern any other material risk, with real metrics, tracked over time, owned by someone senior enough to answer for them

Link – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-does-workplace-people-actually-trust-look-like-sonica-edxxc/