The groundswell of activism from movements such as Women for Change is forcing a long-overdue reckoning with the dangers women face in South Africa.
As the conversation rightfully dominates our public discourse we must have the courage to extend it beyond our homes and streets and into our workplaces.
As leaders we talk a great deal about workplace safety, but we typically frame it around physical hazards and mental health policies. We are failing to see an enormous, invisible risk to our employees every day: exposing them to the use of personal messaging apps such as WhatsApp for professional communication.
For frontline and dispersed team managers WhatsApp groups are often the default by virtue of simply already being there. This seems efficient, but it also threatens our ability to fulfil our duty of care as leaders.
Consider a female employee in a male-dominated field – a security guard, a miner or a logistics worker. To do her job she is added to a shift-based WhatsApp group, often containing dozens, if not hundreds, of colleagues.
Though she will receive relevant shift information directly on her phone, this also forces her to share her private, personal phone number with every person in the group, whether she trusts them or not. She has no digital boundary between her personal life and her work. She is exposed.
You’ll be hard pressed to find a group of professional women in these scenarios who haven’t, at least to some extent, experienced:
- Comments on what they look like.
- Being pulled into unwanted, non work-related chats without a clear option to disengage respectfully with colleagues they haven’t met and have not handed their phone numbers to themselves.
- Receiving private requests to go for a drink, and then being told they are stuck-up, or harassed when “no thanks” is not accepted as an answer.
The mental load of the above contributes enormously to feeling unsafe at work and with colleagues. In a poll I recently did a distressingly high percentage of women report feeling unsafe at work and on the way to work, citing everything from inappropriate comments to outright aggression. The findings showed 10% of the women who participated felt unsafe on a weekly basis, 31% monthly, and 41% between one and four times per year.
The 2024 Deloitte Women@Work Report contained findings that further drive home the point. The report highlighted threats to women’s safety at the workplace and while commuting there. A staggering 10% reported harassment during their commutes and 43% reported harassment and micro-aggressions at work during the previous year.
Protecting our employees means providing them with official and secure internal communication tools.
When we directly or indirectly approve of the use of public communication apps we create an unmonitored, unauditable shadow channel where the harassment can get a foothold. There is precious little oversight or visibility, and no formal way to flag inappropriate conduct. We are in effect enabling unsolicited access to our female employees’ personal contact details and hoping for the best. This is an abdication of leadership.
As a female leader in the technology sector I believe we must be bold in addressing this. Protecting our employees means providing them with official and secure internal communication tools. It’s really not complicated: organisations must own their communication channels.
This means implementing platforms where employees can be part of the team without having to share their personal phone numbers. Platforms where a company has oversight, and where inappropriate behaviour can be immediately flagged, logged and, most importantly, dealt with.
When implemented this way the improvement is immediately noticeable, and I can attest to that after working with large employers of frontline workforces for many years where women are uniquely vulnerable.
If the Women for Change movement is to have lasting impact it must be matched by structural changes. Protecting our employees’ digital privacy is not a “nice-to-have”, it is a non-negotiable component of a safe workplace.
• Van der Lei is CEO of Wyzetalk.
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