Study data reveals abusive behavior increased to a seven-year high, but so did employee confidence and willingness to report misconduct.
Effective employer and worker response to the #MeToo movement resulted in considerable declines in workplace misconduct reports—dropping 15 percent over a five-year span. Yet while new data reflecting a renewed surge of complaints in 2025 indicates abusers feel safer behaving unacceptably again, it also suggests workers are increasingly confident that they’ll receive justice if they denounce that rising harassment.
The top finding of a recent survey of 2,043 U.S. employees was that reports of workplace abuse leapt by 14 percent in 2025 compared to the previous year. That not only ended a half decade of continually declining complaints, but also reached the highest level in the past seven years. All told, 55 percent of workers questioned by workforce relations case management software firm HR Acuity said they suffered or witnessed serious misconduct in the workplace last year, compared to 41 percent in 2024.
Given today’s political climate—and the government drive against diversity, equality, and inclusion, gender parity, equal opportunity, and other policies that sought to level the occupation playing field—it might be reasonable to assume the spike in workplace abuse was a direct result of that shift. But while that causal link has yet to be substantiated, HR Acuity’s survey does make it clear rates of misconduct on the job are on the rise once again.
Still, while the increased complaints suggest perpetrators feel less vulnerable to accusations these days, HR Acuity noted the growing numbers of reports are also a clear sign that targets of misconduct are more confident than ever about denouncing the mistreatment. The illness may be resurgent, but efforts to combat and cure it appear even stronger.
“The findings confirm that employee relations have made great strides to mitigate risk related to workplace harassment and misconduct,” said HR Acuity founder Deb Muller in comments on the survey’s contrasting results. “Not only is misconduct rampant, but employees feel more empowered to speak up and are increasingly using AI to help report concerns, contributing to greater case complexity.”
The findings indeed reflect both good news and bad news for efforts to eradicate workplace misconduct.
While overall rates of abuse were on the upswing for the first time in five years, 78 percent of employees who suffered or witnessed misconduct in 2025 said they’d reported it to officials, up 3 percent from the previous year.
At the same time, 75 percent of respondents who filed complaints said those were resolved through company investigations, an increase of 16 percent over 2024. Better still, 90 percent of respondents whose reports had been officially examined considered the final conclusions and actions taken to have been fair, a gain of 8 percent.
While those responses are positive, the survey still found room for improvement. Notably, 22 percent of employees said they still remain mum about abuse they’ve experienced, often out of fear that employers won’t take steps to protect them.
A similar finding established that while 67 percent of all misconduct occurs inside the workplace, only 76 percent of those incidents are reported. That compared to 28 percent of abuse taking place in non-office settings or during remote work, yet a far higher 86 percent of those cases being flagged by employees.
Among the leading forms of workplace misconduct experienced or witnessed were favoritism or nepotism, bullying or intimidation, policy or code of conduct violations, corruption, and age or gender discrimination.
So, what steps can employers take to prevent, or at least limit cases of abuse increasing in their places of work?
For starters, if they haven’t done so already, companies should establish an anonymous misconduct reporting system—then make sure its availability and privacy is effectively communicated to everyone on staff. Businesses with those platforms already in place should check the statistics on internal investigations into reported abuses, and see how those results match HR Acuity’s worker satisfaction rate average of 90 percent.
Another key is to focus reporting and protection messaging on lower-level employees to ensure they’re not only fully informed, but also feeling more confident in denouncing abuse.
Why is that targeting important? Because only 63 percent of hourly workers who answered the survey said they had ever filed misconduct complaints, and just 61 percent of those were investigated. That paled to the 97 percent of executive respondents who had reported abuse, and 98 percent of those cases that were followed up on.
More generally, employers should regularly update and improve their reporting systems. Those upgrades need to take into account both the rising frequency and changing methods with which abusers misbehave, and the greater willingness of employees to denounce that misconduct.
“In order to create lasting change, the challenge for employee relations is now two-fold: to effectively handle greater volume and more complex investigations at scale and to dig into their data to understand and reach the 22 percent of employees who still don’t speak up,” Muller said.
