Remote work didn't erase the risk of sexual harassment in corporate America. It made it more difficult to police, HR leaders say.

• Sexual harassment might become a bigger threat to the well-being of US workers, HR pros say.
• That's partly because it can be challenging to monitor misconduct in remote and hybrid settings.

Gianna Driver, a human-resources executive, is worried that it might be getting easier for sexual aggressors to target victims on the job.

Harassment hasn't gone away because of the #MeToo movement or because of the pandemic and remote work, Driver, the chief HR officer at the cybersecurity company Exabeam, said.

"It's very much alive," Driver said. "It's just that it has changed and morphed in form."

As more organizations move toward a model where some employees work both remotely and in the office, sexual misconduct is poised to become a bigger threat to the well-being of US workers, Driver and other HR professionals said.

Among many reasons they cited: There are now opportunities for harassment online and in person. Offices with empty cubicles and vacant break rooms can make it easier for predators to get away with misconduct. At the same time, five years after the #MeToo movement gained mainstream attention, many CEOs are busy navigating economic woes like high inflation, a still tight labor market, and the threat of a recession. When it comes to a focus on harassment, many business leaders have moved on.

"The #MeToo movement didn't have time to mature," Alexandra Zea, a client partner and team lead at the HR consultancy Leapgen, said.

She added that the movement was absorbed into larger conversations around diversity, equity, and inclusion after the height of the racial reckoning following the 2020 murder of George Floyd. This merging of priorities isn't necessarily a bad thing, but CEOs have mostly been giving lip service to social issues in recent years, she said.

Remote work changed harassment — it didn't eliminate the risk

Maggie Smith, who has more than two decades of experience in HR, said she'd noticed some employers getting complacent around harassment.

"Right now, I feel like a lot of people are like, 'Oh, it's business as usual,'" said Smith, the vice president of human resources at Traliant, which provides online compliance training.

Zea agreed, saying that fewer CEOs were talking about sexual misconduct and harassment.

"We're two years into these broader conversations, and we're still not seeing actionable plans that have any impact or major impacts that I can point out," Zea said.

In the aftermath of the activist Tarana Burke's #MeToo hashtag going viral in October 2017, millions of women and some men shared their stories of unsafe working environments and attacks. Industry titans including Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and dozens of top business execs faced legal action, ousting, and even prison.

Perhaps as a result of attention to the issue, the number of reports of sexual harassment in the workplace that were filed to the US government peaked at about 13,000 in 2018. The number has decreased every year since, with about 10,000 filed in 2021.

But HR execs said a decrease in the number of reports didn't necessarily mean there'd been a decrease in incidents. In fact, some research points to a worsening situation. In a survey of nearly 3,000 workers around the world, 26% of respondents reported experiencing increased harassment based on their gender while working remotely. The poll was administered by the nonprofit Project Include between September 2020 and January 2021.

In a separate survey of more than 800 Americans by AllVoices, an employee-feedback platform, 24% of respondents said they believed harassment continued or got worse with remote work. And in a Pew survey of Americans from last year, 41% of respondents said they experienced online harassment in general, with a greater share of people reporting online sexual harassment than in prior years.

It's even harder to catch harassment in remote and hybrid workplaces

Not all traditional harassment-training programs account for new methods of aggression, which can include late-night texts, flirty comments in private Zoom meetings, and suggestive emojis in instant messages. Some workers aren't aware that these behaviors can constitute harassment, Driver said, so they don't report the incidents.

Misconduct can also be more likely to happen when colleagues are chatting on platforms that aren't controlled by employers, experts told The New York Times. The informal nature of text messaging, for example, might empower aggressors to make comments that they wouldn't make in an office environment.

There can be extra challenges in a hybrid workplace, an increasingly common arrangement. Many offices aren't as populated as they were before the pandemic. That creates a "prime opportunity" for aggressive behavior, Driver said, because there are fewer people around to witness instances of bad behavior.

And when employees work both remote and on-site, there are simply more opportunities for misconduct.

"As we've returned to offices, yes, I do think that there's going to be an increase in incidents," Driver said. "And we're still going to have all of the Zoom incidents that we have right now."

Part of the problem is that chief human-resources officers aren't always confident about bringing issues and ideas around #MeToo to their CEOs, Smith said.

"Sometimes, HR people take the lead from their CEO, and I don't think they feel like they're empowered to point things out and say, 'Hey, we need to pay attention to this. This is why this is important.'"

But HR departments are increasingly facing budget cuts as the US appears headed toward a recession, perhaps leaving strapped departments less equipped to track and evaluate reports of harassment.

"I don't know that C-suite leaders understand how much attention human resources needs in order to be able to actually be effective," Zea said.

"It's depressing and it's sad," she added, "because the world is changing regardless, and corporations have such a large impact on the world and on people's lives."