OSACO Group

Safeguarding

Q: How can we spot bullying?

Workplace bullying can present itself in various forms. These can range from the open and visibly hostile (e.g. yelling, using derogatory language, ridiculing someone and making impossible demands) to the extremely subtle (e.g. silent treatment, withholding information, sabotage or creating a competitive, divisive environment).

What is Safeguarding

Safeguarding is an umbrella term used primarily in the humanitarian and development community, but which is also applicable to other more familiar contexts e.g. workplaces.

Safeguarding means to prevent and provide protection from sexual exploitation, sexual abuse and sexual harassment (SEAH), and all forms of maltreatment or harm caused by an organisation (e.g., it’s staff, associates, operations, or programmes), where the survivors/victims are amongst the affected local populations (adults-at-risk and children) and/or other staff members.

Safeguarding is not only relevant to communities or environments where work is being undertaken in humanitarian and development contexts. Protection from exploitation, abuse, harassment, intimidation and bullying are equally important everywhere.

The Purpose of Safeguarding

Safeguarding means taking all reasonable steps to proactively prevent harm and address the misuse and abuse of power, particularly in regards to SEAH, but also other forms of harm, such as all forms of workplace harassment and violence.

Organisations and institutions need to be compliant with international and national safeguarding standards. However, compliance alone is not enough. Above all, they need to demonstrate their active commitment to use power responsibly by:

taking account of
giving account to and
being held to account

by the people that their organisation seeks to assist and all the staff they employ (paid or unpaid).

Becoming a safe organisation requires commitment from each staff member and comes with a particular set of responsibilities and duties for senior leadership who need to set the tone by investing in safe programming and recruitment, and robust complaints and response mechanisms.

Download our whitepaper to learn more about safeguarding.

Becoming a Safe Organisation

Safeguarding is essentially about organisational culture. As such, it is a journey that requires buy-in from management, and which needs time, commitment, resources, technical expertise and a shift from siloed approaches towards intersectional collaboration.

It is also a journey that every organisation and institution needs to embark on to create and maintain safe, respectful and dignified work environments for all the people they come into contact with.

OSACO can offer professional, adaptable, constructive and solution-focused support to begin, progress or review your safeguarding journey.

Due Diligence Assessment

The Safeguarding Due Diligence Assessment identifies positive organisational traits and areas needing improvement. It is a thorough and holistic approach that engages the different levels of the organisation.

This process feeds into the development of a realistic plan of action which can be assessed and reviewed on an annual basis.

The Due Diligence assessment helps to:

Identify: supports the organisation to identify opportunities for improvement by identifying who is most at risk of harm (risk to people) and what the operational risks are.
Prevent: prevent harm by reviewing existing policies and procedures, and adjusting them by putting in place strategies to operationalise them in everyday work practices.
Report: looking at how people internally and externally can raise concerns and identifying the various barriers to reporting.
Respond: review procedures in place to manage disclosures of abuse or other harm; incident handling and case management (including investigations); and support systems available to those affected.
Learn: establish an ongoing review system to ensure learning is embedded in organisational culture and systems.

People-Centred Safeguarding

Effective safeguarding has the people who have been harmed, or are most vulnerable to harm, at the heart of its design.

Recognising survivors/victims as knowledge-holders who are core to improving policies and practices, especially in relation to the elimination of SEAH, should be an underlying principle of all safeguarding measures.

As individuals, survivors/victims need their communities to hear, recognise and acknowledge their experiences, with compassion and without blame, to enable a healing process. Complicity, inappropriate reactions, or inaction are the causes of secondary victimisation – the exact opposite of the survivor-centred and trauma-informed approaches.

All people within an organisation need to know how to be part of creating a safe environment, and how to receive and respond to disclosures of workplace harm. All staff members, not only safeguarding/SEAH/Human Resource focal points or case managers, should receive capacity development in this regard.

Ensuring meaningful safeguarding measures are people-centred may therefore include supporting people to practice active and empathetic listening skills, learn how to ask questions sensitively and appropriately, encourage active self-reflection on their own stereotypes and biases, and being aware of what can trigger re-traumatisation.

Safe Workplaces

Protection from exploitation, abuse, harassment, intimidation and bullying are all part of safeguarding.

ILO Convention No. 190 (C190), first adopted in June 2019, is the first international treaty to address violence and harassment in the world of work. It recognises the right of everyone to a work environment free from violence and harassment, including gender-based violence. The convention applies to all sectors and requires a comprehensive approach to prevent and eliminate such behaviours.

Establishing comprehensive and holistic prevention systems that encompass all different forms of workplace violence is essential to creating a safe workplace.

By adopting an intersectional lens, your organisation acknowledges that people's experiences of workplace violence may vary based on their multiple, overlapping identities, and that addressing these complexities is crucial not only for deeper understanding, but for creating and maintaining work environments where everyone feels safe

Becoming fully aware of the various types of workplace violence, and how they can manifest, is the first step in creating safe workplaces; OSACO can assist you with this.

When prevention and process have not effectively provided a safe workplace, OSACO can also support your organisation with our expert workplace investigations service.

Contextualisation

For safeguarding to be effective, it is important to assess each context individually.
Those at risk of harm, and/or survivors/victims, are not a homogenous group and this is why contextualised safeguarding risk assessments are needed.

Each individual experiences and responds to abuse and misuse of power differently, leading to diverging needs; it is vital to understand this when seeking to address and respond to incidents, and design safe programmes. Without a genuine commitment to acknowledge and act on these specific contexts, environments and needs, we will likely fail to protect the very people we are there to support.

This is particularly true of environments such as the aid sector, where additional power dynamics unfold, interact and generate the social hierarchies that shape social and societal attitudes, behaviours and organisational cultures. This may require different or more nuanced approaches relevant to local and cultural contexts.

OSACO has international consultants from a wide range of backgrounds who can support you to create best practice safeguarding frameworks, in collaboration with your partners and communities, in ways that recognise the specific context your organisation operates within.

Claudia Zehl is OSACO’s Global Senior Consultant on Safeguarding.

Read more about Claudia here and download the white paper on Safeguarding (Claudia Zehl and OSACO consultant, Laetitia Goli) here.

Frequently Asked Questions:

How can we spot bullying?

Signs of workplace bullying

You may feel these yourself, or observe these in others

Anxiety or panic around certain colleagues and desire to avoid being around them.
Withdrawal.
Heightened stress levels; these can be also physically visible.
Being mentally drained and your energy is sapped.
Being distressed and experiencing diminishing self-esteem.

Keep in mind that workplace bullying can also happen virtually in online meetings.

How can we create safer workplace environments for people?

Responding promptly and professionally, and taking incoming concerns on workplace harm seriously, is one of the most impactful preventive measures as it encourages people to come forward and feel safe doing so. It also shows that your organisation walks the talk.

Specific actions your organisation can take are:

Awareness raising: forms of workplace bullying; how to spot them; myths around bullying.

Prevention: understanding the underlying causes of workplace harm, such as sexual harassment and bullying; open and safe conversations.

Recruitment: thorough vetting; setting clear expectations and codes of conduct; training during onboarding; analysing performance reviews; conducting exit interviews and utilising relevant learnings from them.

Processes: having clear codes of conduct that clearly state expectations and the zero tolerance of retaliation; safe reporting processes; response mechanisms; and easily accessible support services.