In this episode, Jamey Applegate tackles the challenges of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in modern work culture, focusing on practical DEI strategies for workforce development. The conversation centers on how to create workplace equity and workplace inclusion by empowering employees to move from being passive bystanders to active upstanders when addressing workplace challenges. Through frameworks and real-world examples, listeners learn to foster a more supportive and equitable work environment for all.

Jamey offers practical guidance on recognizing harm, understanding personal responsibility, and safely intervening. Listeners learn the importance of validating others’ experiences, as well as specific tools—the LIFE acronym and the Four Ds of intervention—to confidently step up and create safer, more supportive workplace environments.

Key Topics Discussed:

• The distinction between bystanders and upstanders in workplace incidents
• Why bystanders stay passive and the risks of non-intervention
• The impact of identity, bias, and context in interpreting workplace events
• The LIFE upstander framework (Lead, Identities, Feelings, Evaluation)
• The Four Ds of intervention: Direct, Distract, Delegate, Delay
• Practical scenarios and responses to common workplace harm
• Communicating support and validating those affected
• Encouragement of culture shifts toward accountability and active support
• Resources and ways to connect with the DEI Minute team

I'm Jamey Applegate, Senior Director of DEI at EquityAtWork, and this is your DEI minute, your go to podcast for leaders looking to navigate the ever evolving landscape of diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace. Whether you're just starting out with DEI or looking to sustain your long term successes, each episode will provide you with the actions you can take to move DEI forward at your organization, all in 15 minutes or less. Join us every other week as we break through the noise and help you do DEI right. Let's get to it before we get.

Started, this is Michelle Pfefferman and I'm really excited to let you know that my new book Do DEI Write is now available. This is your guide to the Equity at Work Maturity Model, which shows leaders how to make DEI part of every day and drive great results. You can get your copy through the link in the show notes or wherever books are sold.

In today's episode we're going to talk about what to do when we witness an event or an incident in the workplace. So we're going to talk about being a bystander and then how to move from being a bystander into what we call an upstander. So you might feel like you know exactly what to do when you see something happen, specifically something negative happen. And if you feel confident in your ability to step in, that is awesome. And I hope this episode is just a nice refresher for you and a way for you to support others as they develop their skills for how to actively intervene when something is going wrong. Or you might feel like you've had experiences where you were unsure of what to do or how to help. And if that's you, don't worry. There are so many situations that you can experience in the workplace or see in the workplace and it can be hard to know if you should step in or how to step in or how to help or how not to make it worse.

Every interaction, every event, every incident is unique. It's made up of its own specific context and circumstances and it can be really challenging, really hard to take action confidently in a fast moving workplace environment. So before we get started, I just want to pause and be explicit about how this topic applies to diversity, equity and inclusion. So a huge part of DEI is recognizing that each person is a complex and unique mix of their identities and experiences. And in the workplace, everyone has the desire to be seen for who they are and what they contribute to the team and the organization. So a big part of most folks work life is engaging with others very much, including those who are different from us. Connecting across lines of difference is one of the greatest things about work. Workplaces are one of the few spaces in our lives where we don't get complete say over who we spend time with.

And we usually just have to figure out how to come together, get along, and achieve our goals together. So working with folks who are different than us can be very rewarding, but it can also be challenging and it can create tension. So this tension can manifest in individual interactions that don't feel great, or in larger group settings where things don't feel great. And it can be small one off comments or loud screaming matches. It can even turn physical every time. Tensions over things at work are informed by our own backgrounds and experiences, including our identities and our biases. So many of the situations where we witness an incident or an event, those are driven by someone feeling harmed or hurt by another person or another group of people. And too often that harm is felt because of someone's identity.

So for example, maybe you witnessed a senior leader yelling at a subordinate. Maybe you witnessed someone make a sexist joke. Maybe you saw a graffiti that denigrated a specific religion in the bathroom. Maybe you heard someone mention that someone only got a promotion because of their race. These things happen and they are a problem. So what do we do? How do we take action and support our teammates? First, we're going to start with some definitions. So a bystander is a person who is present at an event or incident but does not take action or intervene. So to someone who just sees something happening, there's a witness.

There are many reasons that people who are bystanders might not take action and step in in the moment. They might feel that it is unclear if the situation requires action. They might fear that they will be harmed for stepping in. They might feel that they do not have the right skills to help or that they might even make the situation worse. Or they might not feel responsible and they might assume or hope that someone else will take action or just resolve itself by not intervening. Bystanders miss critical opportunities to prevent harm and support a person or people who are at risk. An upstander is a person who witnesses a behavior or an event or a situation that could lead to something high risk or harmful and makes the choice to intervene to make things better. Upstanders take action to address daily acts of harm.

So think harassment, bullying, inappropriate jokes. They also take actions to address high risk situations. Physical violence, assault. By intervening, upstanders prevent harm and support people who are at risk. Being a bystander is Typically a passive act. We see something, but we do not intervene. What we really want to encourage is moving from being a bystander who is passive and just witnesses an event to being an upstander and stepping in. So to do this, we can use a very helpful acronym called life.

So to live the upstander life, you want to start with L. You want to lead. You want to notice the situation. Be aware of what's going on around you. Don't get so lost in your own world that you're not paying attention to the things that are happening around you. I Identities Interpret the situation and determine if it is problematic or dangerous. That's part of being a bystander too. But being an upstander is making sure you're looking at it and doing a quick assessment in your own brain to determine if things might be going wrong.

And remember your own identities and biases can influence the ways that you interpret a situation. So just be aware that your experience of the situation might not ultimately be someone else's experience of the situation. F Feelings take personal responsibility. Feelings can motivate action. So work to tune into the emotions that you're seeing and ask yourself what unmet need is underneath that emotion. Finally, E evaluation. Know what to do and intervene safely. And when you intervene, this is another very helpful one.

Use the four Ds of intervention. So number one, direct call out the person causing harm. Step in, call them out. The next one distract. Interrupt the situation. Create a distraction so that the person being harmed can exit. That can involve like yelling or physically stepping in or just making a loud noise in some way. Another one is delegate.

If you don't feel like you're the right person to step in or you feel like it might be harmful for you to step in, get someone else who can help you team up together to address the situation. For this one, also consider hierarchies and power dynamics. If you know that there is someone who you feel like could step in, who is maybe a more senior leader, and if they tell someone to stop doing something, they're really going to stop. Ask them to help out. And then the last one is delay. If the situation seems dangerous, or if the situation is kind of fast moving and really happens quickly and it's over, check in on a delay with the person who you think might have been harmed. Ask them how they are, if they need anything, what supports you can offer. First and foremost, ask if they saw the situation as a problem.

Just ask them, are you okay? And trust their response. If they say they're okay, that's great. If they say they're not okay, that's when you offer more support. So if someone says they're okay, do not insist on helping them. They are saying that they are okay. Trust someone to know their own experience and what they need. So when you witness a situation and it seems off to you, you might have one of the following. I'm not sure if help is really needed in this situation.

And I just want to counter that by saying, remember, you can always ask if someone needs help. They can say no, and you can carry on with your day. And it never hurts to say, hey, that joke or that comment wasn't funny or cool or that's not okay. It's always appropriate to step in and say, I personally found that joke to be in bad taste, or that's not funny at all, or that makes you sound like a jerk. You can say those things. It's okay. You might also think to yourself, am I going to get hurt or harmed if I step in here? Am I going to get punished or have my job prospects hurt? To that, I would say cause a distraction, just make a loud noise, de escalate the situation and remove the person being harmed. Come in and say that there is something super urgent.

Say there is a family crisis, whether or not that's true, and get them out of there. It's okay. You're not going to be harmed for that. It's all right. You might also think, I don't have the right skills and I don't want to make this situation worse. That's always a fear. We don't want to make things worse. Again, going back to that first one, you can always ask others to help you.

You can also always just ask if someone needs help. Asking someone if they need help or asking someone to help you, always valuable. There's power in numbers. Finally, you might think to yourself, this is not really my responsibility. Those are a direct report and their supervisor. The direct report is being yelled at. It's not really my responsibility to step in there. You can't assume that someone else will step in to offer support.

We don't actually know who else is around. And part of helping can be directing someone to the appropriate department or team member for ongoing support. And also, if you were in a situation where you were maybe being harmed, I imagine you would also want someone to step in on your behalf, do the same for others. Start creating that environment where people really take accountability for each other and step in for each other. So I want you to pause for a moment and just think about a situation. Or maybe a few situations where you witnessed something and you found it upsetting. Maybe a team member made a joke about another team member's accent when they spoke English. Or maybe a colleague placed their hand on another colleague's lower back or in a way that caused them to tense up.

Maybe you saw two team members arguing loudly and then they started physically shoving each other. Maybe you're part of a hiring committee and a colleague said that a candidate, maybe it was a male candidate, had the look of a leader and then didn't think the same thing of a female candidate. And just think back. Did you intervene? What did you do? Did you say anything? Did you mention it? Did you follow up and say, you know, this was not okay, or need to figure out how to move forward from this? These kinds of situations arise every day in every workplace. They are a part of work life and a part of what it means when people come together who are different and even people who are the same. Just whenever people come together, there's going to be tension. It is natural for there to be tension and it is expected that people will intentionally or not cause each other harm. Maybe that person that you're witnessing being harmed can handle their own business.

Or maybe not. It is always appropriate to step in and ask if everything's okay. Hopefully everything is just fine. You can step out and go about your day. But if someone needed help, there you are offering to be a support to them. It might seem small, but that person just built a connection and now probably feels like they at least have one person in their corner and someone who saw something and knows what they're experiencing. And that is huge. Because part of being harmed is often that we feel alone and we feel very small.

We feel like no one else sees what's happening. So someone else just validating it and saying I saw what happened and it's not okay can be a total make or break moment for them. Feeling just okay in general. So if you're working on how to support folks transition from being a bystander to an upstander, or if you're just thinking about how do we improve interpersonal interactions. So hopefully we don't even need these skills in the first place, let us know. We're obviously here to help. You can connect with us however you'd like by email or our website and just thank you so much for listening. That's a wrap.

I'm Jamie Applegate and that's your DEI minute for today. Thank you for listening. Please be sure to follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. And don't forget to leave us a review. If you ever have questions, please visit our website or send us an email. You can also sign up for our newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram. Links to everything can be found in the episode Notes. This episode was edited and produced by Potro with podcast art by me, Jamie Apk.