During the weekend, the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba gains spotlight from Chinese general public due to a hot discussion going on on various Chinese social media platforms where a female employee alleges that her supervisor(alias Yi Qu) conducted sex harassment on her during a previous business trip.
The case happened a couple of weeks back where the female employee at Alibaba was asked by her direct supervisor to go for a business trip to Shandong province(a northern province in China), she initially declined the request due to severe weather condition(typhoon Yanhua). However her supervisor criticized her and insisted that she should go for the business trip, she had no means but to accept it.
During the trip, she was asked to having dinner with some business partners with the accompany from her supervisor. During the dinner, she was enforced to drink a lot although she claimed she couldn't drink too much. The end result is that she got drunk after many rounds of toasts. Then the disgusting things happened, the partner conducted harassment on her by touching her body and other behavior, she couldn't resist and react given the drunk state, meanwhile, she was also brought to another room without any other person by the partner for around 20 minutes. Through whole process, her supervisor didn't stop the partner.
The story didn't end here, the female employee was later sent to the hotel where she checked in by her supervisor and another female employee from the partner side. After getting in the hotel room, her supervisor didn't leave immediately, instead he stayed there for around 10 minutes while the female employee from partner side was waiting outside. This is bizarre. Later the supervisor even got the female employee's room key from the reception counter and entered her room again for total four times(each time with different duration).
The next day she found herself was naked when she waked up, also she noticed there was condom package as well which she didn't find before. She felt disgusting and then called police and checked the CCTV footage along with police and hotel employees and found the above shocking scenes(her supervisor entered her room four times).
After returning back from the business trip, she reported this case to HR and other senior leaders in the company and requested the company to fire her supervisor immediately. To her disappointment, there was no direct response and action taken after one week she reported this and some senior leader even claimed that they couldn't fire him to protect her reputation.
She had no other way but by posting this in intranet(per her description), then what she posted got removed from the intranet. And also she printed out some posters and distributed them in employee's pantry to gain more attention but the security guards suppressed this.
With no positive response received post one week and no other better options, she chose to post this on the web and it soon became a hot discussion within the social network and people are criticizing why Alibaba would ignore this and didn't conduct investigation and respond to the employee's request immediately.
Since this becomes a hot discussion, Alibaba comes out quickly and responded that they have suspended her supervisor's duty and are conducting further and thorough investigation led by Jane Jiang, deputy Chief People Officer at Alibaba. The investigation will focus on what happened and what were the misconducts from different leaders(including HR leader as well) during the whole case reporting and feedback process.
Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang was also shocked and felt angry and ashamed after getting to know the case and asked the top leaders to take actions about the case. "Get to know this tonight and I am shocked and feel any and ashamed of what happened to the employee. Not only the HR team but all superviors from different levels should apologize for the ignorance and delayed action. " said by Daniel Zhang in intranet.
The discussion is still ongoing but there are lots of doubts people are having:
- Why the female employee's supervisor didn't stop partner and what he actually did during the four times entering her room? Is this pre-planned?
- Why no action was taken against her supervisor after she reported the case to HR and senior leaders?
- Why the company didn't take serious consideration about the case until it is disclosed on the public internet? Any miss from top leadership?
- Were the top leadership aware of this case or they knew but didn't take action?
More will become clear as the investigation continues to progress.
