Late last year in 2025, i was talking to a founder who had just closed a $15M seed round.

He had a sharp revenue team, a product with real traction, and a sales manager the whole team seemed to love.

Then, over six weeks, three of his best hires resigned.

One after the other.

None of them gave a real reason in their exit interviews.

Just the usual things: "Better opportunity." "Needed a change."

He accepted it and moved on, because founders are taught to move on.

It wasn't until the third resignation that one of the departing employees finally told him the truth over coffee.

The manager they all "loved" had been committing workplace sexual harassment.

The manager was making inappropriate jokes, comments about appearance, and one incident that had escalated well beyond what he felt safe reporting.

What surprised the founder wasn't just the anger, it was the math.

He said: "I didn't even know it was happening. And by the time I found out, the damage was already done."

I've heard versions of that story more times than I'd like.

Most people think of workplace sexual harassment as a legal or HR problem.

It's actually a revenue problem.

The people who generate your revenue are also the people with the most options.

Great salespeople, sharp operators, strong account executives don't stay anywhere that makes them feel unsafe or unseen, they leave quietly and faster than you expect.

Research covered by JD Supra puts the cost of a single workplace sexual harassment case in the hundreds of thousands of dollars when you account for legal fees, lost productivity, and turnover.

That's before you factor in damage to your culture, your employer reputation, or the six months it takes to rehire someone who actually knew what they were doing.

Sexual harassment in the workplace rarely shows up as a line item on a spreadsheet.

But it is directly connected to whether you hit your numbers.

The environment you create determines who stays. Who stays determines your revenue.

It starts with who you hire.

Most founders focus almost entirely on skills during hiring.

Those are the right questions, but they're not the only ones.

The moment you make someone an offer, you're making a statement to everyone already on your team: this is the kind of person we bring here.

Research shows that sexual harassment in hierarchical workplace environments tends to thrive when power dynamics go unchecked.

You are building that hierarchy right now, one hire at a time.

Your interview process has to do more than evaluate competence. It has to surface character.

Here's how:

Ask behavioral questions that reveal how a candidate has handled conflict, how they've treated colleagues with less power, and how they talk about people they didn't enjoy working with. The real answers are always in the details, not the highlights reel.

Bring in a gender equity expert to train your hiring panel before your next senior hire.

Document everything from the first interview forward. Documentation is your legal protection if things go wrong later.

When someone joins your team, they're watching everything.

They notice whether your sexual harassment prevention policy is a real commitment or a throwaway line at the end of orientation.

What happens when something goes wrong.

Whether the reporting process is real, or just exists in a folder nobody reads.

In those first 90 days:

Have every new hire sign a written acknowledgment confirming they understand your workplace harassment policy and know exactly how to report an incident, including a direct path to HR or the CEO if their direct manager is the problem.

Make it clear from day one that retaliation against anyone who reports workplace sexual harassment is a terminable offense and a legal liability. Not as a warning. As a fact.

Ask this during onboarding: "If something made you uncomfortable here, would you feel safe saying something?" Ask it out loud. Adjust based on what you hear.

Most early-stage startups run one training session on sexual harassment in the workplace, feel good about it, and never revisit it.

Then something happens 18 months later and everyone scrambles to find a policy document nobody can locate.

Quarterly refresher training is not optional if you are serious about preventing workplace sexual harassment.

Not a lecture.

Scenario-based conversations where your team works through real situations:

Your managers especially need this training.

As the McDonald's ruling made clear, leadership-level misconduct in the workplace creates serious legal exposure for the company, not just the individual.

Courts examine what the organization knew, what policies were in place, and what action was taken.

Document every training session: dates, attendees, materials covered.

This is the part most founders are least prepared for, because it moves fast and the stakes are immediately high.

Research from the British Psychological Society found that many employees don't report sexual harassment in the workplace because they genuinely don't believe anything will happen.

The person who came to you is already doing something brave. How you respond in the next 48 hours tells your entire organization what you actually stand for.

Here is exactly what to do:

On NDAs: the global direction is clear.

The UK is actively moving to ban NDAs that conceal workplace sexual harassment.

Japan has recently strengthened its national workplace harassment laws.

Even if you're not operating in those markets, the signal is unmistakable. Transparency is becoming the standard expectation, not the exception.

Workplace sexual harassment is not a large-company problem either.

As Business Insider reported, it affects every sector, every company size, every geography.

Remote work didn't reduce the risk.

It just made the warning signs harder to spot.

The founder I mentioned at the beginning eventually rebuilt his team.

It took about eight months and cost him more than he wants to think about.

When I talked to him recently, he said something that stayed with me:

"The hardest part wasn't the legal stuff or the money. It was knowing that someone on my team didn't feel safe enough to tell me until it was already over."

You cannot build consistent revenue on top of a culture where workplace sexual harassment goes unchecked.

The best people always have options.

They will use them if they feel unsafe.

And by the time you realize what's happening, they're already gone.

Your hiring process, your onboarding, your harassment prevention training, your reporting policies, your response when a complaint is filed.

None of it is separate from your revenue strategy.

It is your revenue strategy.

So here's my question for you.

If sexual harassment were happening on your team right now, what's one thing you can do to change that?