When Chef Erin Wade learned that most of her staff had experienced sexual harassment at her restaurant Homeroom in Oakland, California, she was stunned. The inciting incident back in 2015 involved a father of four who reached under a server’s blouse in front of his children. “We’re a family restaurant, our specialty is mac and cheese!” Wade recalls with lingering disbelief. Yet the more she spoke with employees, the clearer it became that Homeroom was not a particular hotbed for harassers. The problem, in fact, was everywhere. “My staff said they’ve experienced harassment in every restaurant they worked at, but they never before dared to bring the issue to their management.” The restaurant industry remains rife with harassment: Nearly 80 percent of female staff and 49 percent of male staff report having experienced sexual harassment at work from clients, chefs and co-workers, according to a 2014 study by Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United. Two-thirds of adults in the U.S. have worked in restaurants at some point in their lives, according to one survey, so the magnitude of the issue is enormous. And existing training programs, such as bystander training, have been shown to have short-term effects, but limited lasting impact without broader organizational changes.  At Homeroom, Wade and a group of female staffers decided to create a three-step system, simple enough to function for the nearly 100 employees even during a chaotic dinner rush. Customer behavior was color-coded: yellow, orange or red. “Yellow refers to a creepy vibe or unsavory look,” Wade explains. “Orange means comments with sexual undertones, such as certain compliments on a worker’s appearance. Red signals explicit sexual comments, touching, or repeated incidents in the orange category after being told the comments were unwelcome.” Image courtesy of Erin Wade When a staff member experiences harassment, they report the color — “I have a yellow at table three” — and management is required to respond immediately, no questions asked. With a yellow, the employee could choose to switch tables. Orange means the manager or another server immediately takes over the table. If red is reported, the manager ejects the customer from the restaurant.  The surprising result: Since Homeroom implemented the system over ten years ago, the most egregious harassment has ceased to be a problem. Yellows and oranges still occur, but Wade has to reflect for a while before she remembers the last time a server saw red. She believes that the system is “so effective because it changes the power dynamics at a very basic level. It doesn’t require staff to question their feelings and cuts off bad behavior before it can even start. Maybe a customer is checking out a server and thinking about making a move, and then a totally different person takes over and they never see the first server again.” She has since expanded the three-step system for use with racist incidents or even when clients are just plain rude. “If someone wears a really offensive t-shirt, like a white guy wearing a shirt with the N-word, he shouldn’t eat here,” Wade says. “I’d rather lose a customer.” Most importantly, since Wade first wrote publicly about the system in a 2018 Washington Post op-ed, the anti-harassment recipe has spread far beyond the now three Bay Area Homeroom restaurants. The government agency tasked with enforcing harassment legislation, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, adopted the method as a national best practice after consulting with Wade. “I walk into places all the time and discover they’re using it,” Wade says. “I was at [the cocktail bar] True Laurel in San Francisco recently and saw our poster hanging on the wall.” The model has spread beyond California, often through former Homeroom employees who opened their own establishments elsewhere –– for instance, at Good Times Bagels in Boise, Idaho, founded by a former Homeroom manager. Since selling her majority stake in Homeroom in 2020, Wade has been investing in other restaurants and coaching other restaurant founders across the U.S. and in countries as far away as Copenhagen. “A lot of the hospitality leaders there already knew about the system or were using it in their restaurants and bars,” she says.  What surprised Wade most was how organically the model spread. “It’s taken on a life of its own,” she says. One reason the system works, Wade believes, is precisely because customers often do not realize it is being used. “We never announced it,” she says. “To me, that’s part of the elegance of it.” If a server experiences discomfort, another staff member could simply take over the table without publicly confronting the customer unless the situation escalated to a red. “From a hospitality perspective, that’s actually better,” Wade explains. “Most of the time it just means a different person takes over your table. I didn’t see the benefit of announcing why.” Weighed down by negative news? Our smart, bright newsletters deliver the uplift you’ve been looking for. Or click here to choose exactly which ones you want [contact-form-7] Some restaurants display the policy publicly as both a point of pride and a deterrent. Wade understands that approach as well. “Some want guests to know: we’re aware of these issues, so don’t try something.” But at Homeroom, discretion has remained central, except for when a customer is asked to leave, at which point he is told the reason (and in Wade’s experience, it was always a he). Remarkably, the original framework is virtually unchanged. “Like many systems that work, it’s effective the way it’s written,” Wade says. Erin Wade Recently, a fellow restaurateur suggested customers committing a “red” offense should receive a warning before being thrown out. Wade refused to dilute the policy. She said her friend could interpret it as she liked, but, “I said, if you want me to train your staff, it has to be the system as written,” she recalls. “I don’t think people should get warnings for behavior that’s clearly across the line.” The clarity, she argues, is precisely what makes employees feel safe. Wade, a lawyer by training and a feminist at heart, is not your typical restaurant owner. She has a degree from Princeton and worked in the restaurant industry before studying law, but found the experience in the kitchen so stressful and degrading that she didn’t see a future there. But after long days in her law office, when she craved mac and cheese, she couldn’t find a cozy restaurant open late at night to order her comfort food from. And so she founded Homeroom in 2011, with the slogan: “Homeroom is the best part of your day.”  “That’s my mission, for my clients as well as for my staff,” Wade says. “Therefore, we have a zero-tolerance policy.”  But she also realized that diversity was essential to the solution. When she started Homeroom, all shift managers on the floor were men. “That was part of the problem. You should never have any layer of management just composed of one group, whether female or male,” Wade argues. “Men and women often think differently about what they find inappropriate or threatening.” She now takes pride in the fact that she diversified every layer of management. “[A] restaurant is about so much more than food, it’s about community building and also creating social change through different means.”  For her, the deeper lesson is not simply demographic diversity but organizational trust. “This system only works if you already have a culture of communication and transparency,” Wade says. She implemented an open-book policy for the company, sharing financial information with employees and inviting staff to management meetings. “If you already have a lot of ways for staff to communicate with leadership, then saying, ‘I’ve got an orange at table five’ doesn’t feel scary,” Wade explains. “It’s not the first difficult conversation you’ve ever had.” Wait, you're not a member yet? Join the Reasons to be Cheerful community by supporting our nonprofit publication and giving what you can. Join Cancel anytime For instance, she invited employees to fill out feedback forms after every shift describing what had gone well, what had gone wrong and what could be improved. “We made hundreds of incremental improvements that way,” Wade says. “Not just around culture — around efficiency, staffing, workflow. It made the business stronger.” The approach requires significant investment of time and labor. But Wade argues the payoff extends far beyond employee morale. She says it increased productivity and retention, too, noting that employees stay an average of two-and-a-half years, compared to the industry average of fewer than 90 days, and that Homeroom’s financial metrics put it in the top one percent of restaurants in terms of revenue per square foot. “I think people stayed because they felt protected and connected,” she says. “This is just good business. Any customer-service business could use it.” The post Yellow Means Creepy: The Color-Coded Anti-Harassment System Used by Restaurant Workers appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.