Client Case #25. A Case of Office Stalking, or Putting an End to Intrusive Behavior in the Workplace

What is stalking?

According to the Victim Connect Resource Center, stalking is a course of conduct directed at a specific person that would cause a reasonable person to feel fear. Such pattern of behavior is dangerously common.

In 2021, the first National Survey on Harassment and Violence at Work in Canada was released. The statistics it provided on such a pattern of behavior are both enlightening and dangerously widespread:

• 65% of respondents experienced at least one form of harassment and violence at work;
• 26.5% of respondents surveyed experienced at least one form of work-related online harassment.

And while the report in question is Canadian, its findings are certainly relevant worldwide. It’s also wise to keep in mind the tendency of victims of stalking to remain silent about what has happened. Moreover, companies don’t like to bring such incidents to light in order to avoid reputational damage. Thus, these figures could be somewhat of an understatement.

Today, we're going to cover the topic of office stalking. We will describe how our Kickidler employee monitoring software helped to investigate and prevent an accident related to stalking at our client's company. So, first things first.

Our client case

A small IT company (let's call it N) hired a new employee, Gregory (the name is fictitious, of course), as a programmer. During the onboarding process Gregory was supervised by Emily (also a fictitious name), who by that time had been working at the company for more than two years. Emily, being a very responsible employee, introduced Gregory to her colleagues, helped him to get all the necessary clearances, advised him on his first Jira tasks. In short, she made sure that Gregory felt comfortable during his first weeks in the new place.

Issue

The only downside is that Gregory interpreted Emily's behavior as attraction and started stubbornly trying to get her attention in areas unrelated to work. Emily's pleas not to intrude on her personal space had little effect. Gregory kept texting her intrusive and increasingly threatening private texts via personal messengers and, what's worse, stalking her on her way home from the office.

Emily described Gregory's behavior as disturbing and unsettling. His actions turned her beloved place of work into a torture zone. She warned Gregory that she would have to report him to the HR Department if he did not stop harassing her, after which Gregory deleted all their digital correspondence and proceeded to write toxic messages to her and her acquaintances from fake accounts outside of work hours.

When Emily finally did reach out to HR for help and an internal review began, Gregory denied everything and claimed that he was being slandered and that Emily had no evidence whatsoever of the allegations she made against him.

Solution

The situation appeared hopelessly dead-end. Emily either had to continue enduring the unhealthy advances of her new colleague or quit her job. However, at the time of hiring, Gregory did not pay attention to the clause in the contract stating that “the Employer has the right to use monitoring tools to ensure the Employee's compliance with the policy.”

Yes, you've guessed correctly, company N had Kickidler employee monitoring software installed on all work PCs of their employees. That meant that all logs of employee activity, including full video recordings of the workday and keystroke logs, were securely stored on the company's servers, patiently waiting for their time to become of help.

Thanks to Kickidler's Keylogger feature, management could review the history of all Gregory's correspondence and find all the intrusive messages he had sent to Emily. And thanks to the screen video recording feature, it was proven that Gregory had written these messages specifically to Emily and not some other employee. The data collected with Kickidler helped the company's executives to make a fair decision and keep a valuable employee (Emily) on the team.

Conclusion

Surely, to deal with cases of stalking or bullying in the work environment in an efficient manner, it is necessary to establish adequate corporate policies, educate employees and create an atmosphere where employees feel free to speak up and report any concerns without fear of repercussions. But still, all those things are not the absolute cure-all for such incidents. At times, employee monitoring software, particularly Kickidler, can be the final argument in such tricky situations, as the only solution in its field that fully records the entire history of employee activity at their computers.

Do you have any interesting stories about the way our Kickidler employee monitoring software helped you solve your business problems? E-mail us at marketing@kickidler.com, and we'll be happy to publish them, maintaining confidentiality, if necessary.

Kickidler Employee Monitoring Software