How transparent is your company? Our index will show which companies silence workers

Corporate America has a transparency problem. According to the Deloitte Insights 2024 Global Human Capital Trends, 86% of leaders surveyed “say that the more transparent the organization is, the greater the workforce trust.” Yet the vast majority of those same leaders are doing little to foster transparency or trust within their organizations by using silencing mechanisms like forced arbitration and nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) to prevent their workers from revealing workplace toxicity from the moment they sign onboarding paperwork.

Though you may not know it, these silencing mechanisms are buried deep in your workplace contracts or other dense paperwork. Sometimes, they are sent to you by your employer in an email with an innocuous subject line that you open, unaware that by doing so you have “agreed” to give up your right to sue or even to discuss what happened to you in the event you face a toxic workplace experience, such as racial, age, or gender discrimination. Sometimes, they are offered to you in exchange for a promotion or severance or settlement.

You may not realize that you signed away your right to a jury trial or to even talk about a bad workplace experience with anyone, including coworkers, family members, or even a clergy member or therapist, until it is too late to do anything about it.

Regardless of the reason, 82% of all American workers are bound by forced arbitration, which means that they must resolve any dispute with their employer in a secret chamber where an arbitrator—typically an older, white man who has had no experience being discriminated against himself—has the power to decide whether you have a claim and how much you should be compensated for it.

Most lawyers, knowing that arbitrators typically side with the employer, are reluctant even to represent you, regardless of the merits of your case. There are no appeals and the arbitrator’s decision is final. Unlike a trial by jury, arbitration takes place in secret and your ability to call witnesses is severely limited. To say that the deck is stacked against an employee bringing an arbitration claim is an understatement.

Arbitration is not the only tool for companies to silence their workers. More than one-third of all workers are bound by NDAs, which means that they cannot warn anyone, including their colleagues, about a predator in their midst. In this way, organizations protect themselves from bad publicity and public lawsuits, at the expense of the transparency they tell researchers is so critical to “building trust” in the workplace.

Our organization, Lift Our Voices, has worked hard to give workers back their power by passing two bipartisan landmark laws in recent years that ban forced arbitration and pre-dispute NDAs for survivors of and witnesses to sexual misconduct. But much more work remains to be done, not only on the legislative front to expand these laws to cover all toxic workplace issues but also to educate workers about whether their companies are among those that are using silencing mechanisms to cover up unethical and illegal behavior.

Next month, we are launching the LOV Where You Work Index, which will score companies in the Russell 3000 on their use of NDAs and forced arbitration. This new index will give employees and job seekers a comprehensive resource to better understand employers’ workplace practices around silencing mechanisms, empowering them to make informed decisions about where they work. At the same time, employers across the nation will have the opportunity to lead the way on transparency by joining LOV to create visibility around their current workplace policies.

We are clear-eyed about what is happening in corporate America today. Companies are moving away from inclusive practices, with some major employers refusing to fill out questionnaires from storied civil rights organizations about the composition of their workforce or no longer agreeing to give priority to suppliers that reflect the full fabric of America. That is, of course, their right as private companies. But at a time of full employment, it is also the right of Americans to work at companies that don’t just talk the talk about transparency, but also walk the walk.

To be fair, forced arbitration clauses and NDAs have become such boilerplate languages in corporate contracts that many organizations do not even realize that they are included in the paperwork they hand out to employees. Often, leaders do not even realize that by silencing women and people of color, who are much more prone to being bound by these silencing mechanisms, they are pushing out the very kinds of workers they want to retain. We hope that our Index will raise awareness of these clauses and provide an incentive for companies to change these policies.

There are countless indexes that tout companies as “Best Places to Work” for women, people of color, members of LGBTQ+ communities, and other traditionally disenfranchised groups. But if employees are silenced from their first day on the job, how can they really tell surveyors the truth about their workplace environments? The Index will be the first of its kind to delve into the fundamental problem in the workplace from which all others stem—the ability for workers to be transparent about the kinds of conditions they encounter on the job.

The Index will allow workers to easily search for any given company listed on the Russell 3000 and know within moments whether that company is serious about workplace transparency. The ones already doing the right thing—refusing to silence workers through forced arbitration and NDAs—will have no hesitation in filling out this survey and signaling that they are, indeed, working hard to earn their employees’ trust. We hope that even employers who do use these practices will fill out our survey, so that their employees and contractors know what they are facing when choosing to work for them.

At the very least, our Index will make abundantly clear which companies are serious about improving workplace transparency and earning their employees’ trust. When Americans love where they work, their productivity increases, which is good for everyone. The LOV Where You Work Index aims to do just that by ensuring that every employee feels welcome and safe on the job.