Hey, welcome back. It's Mark, and here's the Employee Survival Guide episode Workplace Retaliation: What to Do When HR Ignores Your Complaints. And as always, this is the podcast for employees only. If you are an employer or an HR rep listening in, you might want to turn this off because I'm about to tell your workforce exactly what you don't want them to know about. I love this job. Today we are tackling a scenario that I see constantly in my practice. It's the double whammy. Whammy number one. You experienced discrimination, harassment, or saw something illegal and you did the right thing. You reported to HR. It's doing the right thing. Oh, then comes whammy number two. HR does absolutely nothing. They ghost you, they ignore you, and suddenly you feel like the problem. The silence isn't just annoying. It's a tactic. And today I'm going to teach you how to survive it. First, let's get the hard truth out of the way. I say this all the time, but it bears repeating. Human resources is not your friend. I do have friends in human resources. They're nice folks, but they are employed by the company, the private government, so they have their allegiance to them. They pay their income and their mortgages. They are not the employee happiness department. They are the risk management department. Their primary client is the company, not you. When you file a complaint about a manager or a toxic culture, you are introducing risk. If they ignore you, it's often a calculated bet. They are betting that you will get frustrated, give up, and just quit, or so that the problem goes away. Not kidding. That's statistically probably pretty accurate that happens because it's cheap. But here is the legal reality. If you complained about a protected activity like discrimination based on race, gender, age, disability, or unpaid wages, and they ignore it, they are failing their legal duty to investigate. And it's no joke. They start treating you coldly, cutting your hours, or excluding you from meetings because you complain, that is retaliation, and retaliation is illegal. I'm going to tell you that it's the easiest claim that we can prove, and it happens all the time. So when the silence from HR becomes deafening, here is your survival plan. Step one is what I call weaponizing your documentation. If HR is ignoring you, you need to assume you are building a case for a future lawsuit. I need you to create a forensic record of everything. Most employees make the mistake of keeping everything on their work laptop. Don't do that. If they fire you tomorrow, you lose your evidence. Get a personal journal or a non-work-related email address. I want you to log every single interaction. Who did you complain to? When did you send it? What exactly did you say? Who witnessed the original incident? If HR ignores your email, don't just sit there stewing. Print the email to PDF and save it on your personal drive. If you have a hallway conversation with the HR director who blows you off, write down the date, time, and exactly what was said immediately afterwards. In the legal world, if it isn't written down, it didn't happen. You are building a timeline that shows negligence on the part of the employer. Step two is setting the trap. I love this. Do it every day. It's just, you'd be so surprised how many people, very smart, wealthy people, fall into this every single time. It's probably one of the funnest things that I do, what I do. It's it just happens. I mean, I didn't make it up. The employer made it up and made it happen, so I'm just gonna set the trap. If you sent a complaint and it's been about two weeks with no response, you need to force their hand. Send a follow-up email, but not an angry one. I want you to be the most professional, reasonable person in the room. Write something like this as an example. Dear HR director, I'm writing it to follow up on a formal complaint submitted on such and such date regarding discrimination. You don't have to use magic words. I have not received an update from you. Please confirm the status of the investigation. When I can expect a determination, I'm concerned that the delay is impacting my ability to work effectively. Why do we write this? Because now they they can't say, oh, it slipped through the cracks. You are putting them on notice. You are creating a paper trail that shows that they knowingly ignored a serious legal issue. If we end up in court, a jury loves these emails. It makes the company look incompetent and malicious. And more importantly, there's such a thing called an affirmative defense by the employer that once they received notice of your complaint, they did an investigation. If they didn't do one, they don't have an affirmative defense and they lose. So it's actually a famous Supreme Court decision that came out. So the employer has an obligation to itself to protect itself. So it's rare that I see that employer doesn't do an investigation. They'll always do an investigation, but I want to tell you something that are not going to tell you the result of the investigation. That never, ever happened 99% of the time. If the email gets ignored, it's time to escalate. Check your employee handback book. Yes, actually read it. I know it's boring. Does it have an alternative reporting channel? Maybe a corporate compliance hotline, a corporate ombudsman, or an ethics officer? Use it. This proves you tried every internal option available to report your complaint to the management. But if the internal doors are shut, you need to go external. You need to call me. You have the right to file a charge with the EEOC, which is the Eco Employment Opportunity Commission, and the state equivalent human rights agency. You generally have 180 days to 300 from the incident that happened to file a complaint. This is a powerful move. Once you file with the EOC, the company has to respond. They can't ghost the federal government. I've never seen that actually happen. Every employer responds. I mean, you have a defense counsel out there that does make a lot of money responding to these complaints. However, a word of caution, filing with the EOC is like pulling a pin on a grenade. Not kidding. So when you do this, be prepared for the fallout. It puts you in a protected class. It does protect you, but it also paints a target on your back. Remember when we were kids and they put the, you know, they get the thing stuck in your back and said, kick me? Well, that's what's going to happen. It's going to kick you. Kick you in the ass. This is usually the moment you want to have an employment attorney guiding you behind the scenes and to navigate and setting up and setting the trap for the employer. We do it every day. I love that part of my job. And it usually results in cases resolving themselves before they file get filed to court. So the sooner you act, the better, because you don't want to be in court. You don't want to be paying lawyers' law bill fees for three years. So one final warning before you wrap up. When HR ignores you, the environment can get intolerable. You might feel like you have no choice but to quit. Careful. In the law, we call this a constructive discharge. It means the working conditions are so bad, a reasonable person had to leave. But this is very hard to prove, and I encourage you not to do it. You only want to get fired. You want to leave your employment through a severance agreement where you release your claims. If you just quit in frustration, you might lose your right to severance, unemployment, or even your loss of even incentive compensation. Before you resign, please talk to an attorney like myself, an employment attorney that might be able to negotiate an exit package for you before you walk out the door using their negligence and their mishaps as leverage to help you. So with that said, listen, being ignored is a power play. Don't let them feel invincible or invisible. Document the silence, follow up in writing, and know your rights. You have more power than you think. You just need to know how to use it. If you're dealing with this right now, check out our website, capclaw.com. For more resources, keep coming back to this episode or the podcast. And thank you for allowing me to be service.