Marcus Lashley, an Equal Employment Opportunity professional with the Defense Commissary Agency, recently directed my attention to some Equal Employment Opportunity Commission statistics involving discrimination charges in the federal sector.
In fiscal 2009, discrimination cases cost the federal government $12 million in legal fees, $10.2 million in compensatory damages, $15.7 million in lump-sum awards and $41.7 million in total benefits.
The good news is that of 16,947 complaints filed, the vast majority were dismissed. As I wrote in a previous blog post, The 97 Percent problem: Why Meritless Claims Matter, almost 97 percent were deemed “meritless.” Or is it good news?
Just because a claim is dismissed doesn’t mean it doesn’t cost time, productivity and money.
Every charge filed must be investigated, written up, reviewed, responded to and managed, regardless of whether it is ruled valid or not. And at a time when government agencies are facing profound pressures to reduce spending, this is an expense we can ill afford.
How much time do these invalid complaints consume? Using fiscal 2009 statistics, input from colleagues in the federal sector and some rough assumptions, I compiled a “back-of-the-envelope” estimate based on 16,947 complaints, each involving:
• Forty hours of professional investigation
• Forty hours of investigative review
• Eighty hours to compile responses to information requests
• Eight hours of complainant and witness interviews
• Sixty hours of workplace distraction
You do the math: It comes to an astonishing 3,863,916 total hours. Assuming an average hourly rate of $30 (including benefits) per employee, the bottom line adds up to $115,917,480, not including damages, back wages, attorneys’ fees, travel costs and other incidentals of lost productivity. Simply by eliminating half of these complaints, the federal government could have saved about $58 million, conservatively speaking.
As we look for ways to conserve limited resources and maximize efficiency, values of inclusion, respect and dignity become increasingly important. Not only do we want to reduce costly lawsuits and complaints, but we also want to change the underlying behavior that causes them. Workplace harassment and discrimination training is one way to accomplish this, and the most effective instruction goes beyond teaching the law to give people the skills they need to make a sustained difference in the workplace.
We’ll soon discuss the issues that prompt these claims and how they can be minimized.
Stephen Paskoff is president and CEO of Atlanta-based ELI Inc., a provider of ethics and compliance learning solutions. He can be contacted at info@eliinc.com.
