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Nasir and Matt start the week by discussing the blatant forms of sexual harassment alleged at Zillow. They also answer "My office is planning on doing a weight loss competition at the beginning of the year. Is this legal?" Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: All right, welcome to our podcast where we cover business in the news and answer some of your business legal questions, where you, the listener, can send in to ask@legallysoundsmartbusiness.com. My name is Nasir Pasha. MATT: And I’m Matt Staub. NASIR: Nice. Perfect intro, that time. MATT: Perfect intro. Short intro, I guess. NASIR: Nice and succinct. MATT: I guess we’ll just get into the story. this is a pretty interesting one. We’ve talked about similar things in the past in terms of – oh, I guess we talk about employee – bad employee or employee practices all the time. This one’s a little bit different. NASIR: Sure. MATT: We’ve got to the point where we have to find very, very unique ones because we’ve basically talked about everything else. NASIR: That’s true, but what’s interesting is that, for those that have been listening since for about a year, you can already tell what the biggest issues that small, medium, and large businesses go through just by the recurrence of the topics, and this is, I think, a very common issue. MATT: I don’t know how big Zillow is, but it’s… NASIR: It’s a good size. MATT: Yeah, it’s a pretty good size. But, apparently, Zillow is a very – how did they describe it? – “adult frat house” culture. So, there’s a lot of men that work there and not as many females. Apparently, I guess the men just think they can do whatever they want. We’ll link this article because you have to see, I guess, read the text messages. I’m not going to read the text messages now of what was said, like, back and forth. NASIR: You’ve got to give some kind of indication of what it is – maybe paraphrase or something. MATT: Basically, I think this is the female asking, “Wanna go join a gym and work out tonight?” and then, the response is basically asking for sexual favors. NASIR: Yeah. MATT: So, like, very non sequitur at the least, right? And, of course, the response is, “Not really.” But it seems like a situation where the guy has just gotten way too comfortable. It’s definitely not a work environment – I guess that’s the point to really nail down here. The things that these guys were saying to this – at least this woman here, and I’m sure the other ones that work there – were just way past the line of anything that should be said in a work environment or probably even just a normal environment in general. NASIR: Yeah, I’m just reading these texts and we read one text that it’s just obviously, like, not appropriate. But then, these are texts between also the possible victim of harassment and another co-worker, and they’re just kind of talking back and forth, you know, “I feel bad though because he’s already ready to have a kid and I don’t want to basically tell him,” and then the other person’s like, “Oh, he won’t get fired. I would just tell Eddie about it to watch this video,” and then it just shows you how they are reluctant to even report about it and, even if they do, they know nothing is going to happen anyway so what’s the point? And this is what I think the complaint is talking about – this kind of hostile work environment. MATT: Yeah, and we’ve talked about culture before and how important that is in the work environment. But, like, in this example, there was some guy, one of the guys there watching non-appropriate video at work and the female was trying to figure out whether she should tell someone. I think the supervisor actually even knew about it and saying, “Well, he’s about to have a kid so he’s having a pretty tough time right now.” It’s like, well, that’s a whole different issue going on that this guy’s about to be a dad and is watching this video, but whatever. It seems like the supervisor knew what was going on and I think they’ve even ...