[bastawhiz]

You don't "measure" zero tolerance. And there's no success here--that is, there's no point at which you say "this problem is solved." You commit to throwing out the bad apples, you throw out the bad apples, and promise to throw out any bad apples as you find them in the future.

[xapata]

Claiming zero tolerance is a desire to stay ignorant of your measuring precision. You need to know how accurate your tools are before you can estimate how many incidents occur.

[xapata]

Let me rephrase less aggressively:

If you pick a "zero" tolerance, that's saying your measurement can actually be zero and there's no need to improve from that point. If you pick a measurement that can only asymptotically approach zero, then you are recognizing that improvement is always possible.

[bastawhiz]

But if you're able to measure a problem, that means you've identified a violation of your zero tolerance policy. Which begs the question, why is your measurement more effective at finding the problem than the enforcers of the policy?

If you're not half-assing your zero tolerance policy, measuring it is immaterial. Find an offender, fire them. The number of firings in hindsight isn't a factor towards your future, since those people are gone. There's not a meaningful measurement that you can make, because after you fire someone, they don't impact your numbers anymore. You assume the problem is ongoing and will continue to be ongoing, you immediately and harshly deal with the problem when you encounter it, and you move on to finding more problems. There is no gray area.

[xapata]

> after you fire someone, they don't impact your numbers anymore

They would if your measurement is incidences per month. Otherwise you could fire someone every day and think you're doing a good job at office culture. I'd rather not have any harassment. Of course, you'd need to be careful not to discourage reporting of incidences. Measuring things is tricky.

> Find an offender, fire them

What's your technique of "finding" problems? Could it be improved? How would you know?

> no gray area

Of course there is. How do you know when someone accidentally insinuated sex versus intended a salacious proposal? Or accidentally touched someone's rear while passing by? Because it happened 6 times in 2 days? What about 2 times in 6 months?