Google’s new rules take aim at harassment

SAN FRANCISCO – Google is taking a tougher stance on workplace harassment following a nearly year-long campaign of bullying and intimidation set off by the firing of Google engineer James Damore.

New rules sent to employees last week and reviewed by USA TODAY aim to curb online attacks and internal conflict, particularly over the highly charged issue of diversity at the company. According to the documents, Google will discipline employees who “troll” (deliberately provoke) or “dox” (leak online private information such as home addresses) their co-workers.

With more explicit rules governing harassment and how Google employees can interact with one another in internal online discussion forums, Google says it’s trying to preserve open debate inside the company while creating a safer work environment for its 80,000-plus staffers.

Those forums have increasingly become hotbeds for harassment, according to employees who volunteer as diversity advocates. In January, they told USA TODAY they had been targeted by co-workers, who leaked personal information and comments from internal company forums to far-right websites,

In an FAQ, Google advised employees: “The important aspect to consider is how you’re communicating your views – you should be debating the issue, not attacking the person.”

leading to violent threats and slurs.

The situation had grown so tense in recent months that Google sought a protective order against Damore, who sued Google in January, to prevent future legal filings that name Google employees who were not party to the lawsuit.

Screen shots of employee discussions that had been included in Damore’s suit led to doxing, Google alleges.

Damore’s lawyer Harmeet K. Dhillon said she will fight the motion for a protective order in a court hearing scheduled for July 13.

Damore slapped Google with the lawsuit after the company fired him last year for an internal memo arguing gender differences could explain the shortage of women in technical and leadership roles in the technology industry.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the new workplace rules last week in an email to all employees. A small group of employees shared them with USA TODAY.

The new rules Google introduced last week are “leaps and bounds better than anything Google had published prior,” said software engineer and diversity advocate Tariq Yusuf, one of a small group of Google employees who spent months lobbying Google management to shield employees from harassment.

Much of the reaction to the new rules inside the company has been positive, but Yusuf and a handful of other Google employees say the rules may not go far enough to shut down the toxic waves of harassment he and others experienced.

“I personally feel a little safer, but I doubt that most people who’ve been targeted will be able to relax until (Google) builds up a clear track record of handling difficult cases well,” Google software engineer Irene Knapp told USA TODAY.

Lack of civility in internal debates on both sides of the diversity debate prompted Google to update its policies, the company said. In an FAQ, Google advised employees: “The important aspect to consider is how you’re communicating your views – you should be debating the issue, not attacking the person.”

The Damore memo and his firing exposed deep rifts inside Google.

Facing pressure to diversify its workforce – which is nearly 70 percent male and 89 percent white or Asian – Google began publicly sharing data on the racial and gender makeup of its employees in 2014. The Silicon Valley company’s attempts to re-engineer its demographics to include more women and people of color have put Google in the crosshairs of the nation’s culture wars.

Employees who spoke with USA TODAY say Google’s much-vaunted workplace culture, where staffers are encouraged to freely exchange viewpoints on internal message boards, became as polarized as the national political debate.

After Damore’s firing, some employees accused the company of unfairly firing an employee merely for expressing his personal beliefs. Others argued Google had done too little to advance women and other underrepresented groups or to regulate hate speech and harassment at Google.