“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” We all remember this saying from childhood. The truth of the matter is that words all too often can and do hurt.
Statistics show that bullying is three times as prevalent as illegal discrimination and at least 1,600 times as prevalent as workplace violence. Statistics also show that while only one employee in every 10,000 becomes a victim of workplace violence, one in six experiences bullying at work, according to “Workplace Bullying” on Wikipedia. In 2008, Dr. Judy Fisher-Blando wrote a doctoral research dissertation on Aggressive Behavior: Workplace Bullying and Its Effect on Job Satisfaction and Productivity. The scientific study determined that almost 75% of employees surveyed had been effected by workplace bullying, whether as a target or a witness.
With these staggering statistics, it is imperative that employers look at their policies and their workplace to first assess what is going on, then make a concerted effort to eliminate bullying in the workplace, and finally, prevent bullying from happening in the first place.
Assess Your Situation:
Bullying is not just the common name calling and shoving on the playground. Bullies have become adept at creating very hostile work environments. Xenium defines bullying as “repeated inappropriate behavior, either direct or indirect, whether verbal, physical or otherwise, conducted by one or more persons against another or others, at the place of work and/or in the course of employment.” Supervisors and managers may not see what is happening or may be participating in the bullying themselves. It is important to examine your work environment and look for these types of behaviors:
1. Threat to professional status – This can include belittling opinions, public professional humiliation, accusations regarding lack of effort, or intimidating use of discipline or competence procedures.
2. Threat to personal standing – This may include undermining personal integrity, destructive innuendo and sarcasm, making inappropriate jokes about the employee, persistent teasing, name calling, insults, and/or intimidation.
3. Isolation – This can be typical of management with subordinate employees and can include preventing access to opportunities, physical or social isolation, withholding necessary information, keeping the employee out of the loop, ignoring or excluding the employee from company events.
4. Overwork – Another typical bullying tactic from management includes undue pressure, impossible deadlines, and unnecessary disruptions.
5. Destabilization – This might include failure to acknowledge good work, allocation of meaningless tasks, removal of responsibility, repeated reminders of blunders, setting the employee up to fail, or shifting goal posts without telling the employee. (Rayner, C., 2001)
Eliminate Bullying:
Removing bullying from the workplace will involve effort from all levels of the organization. Management must step in and create a work environment that is intolerant of this type of behavior. Creating policies and putting in place Employee Handbooks is key in removing this bullying.
Managers and supervisors must also be trained to recognize bullying behaviors. Providing Supervisory Training is something that many companies choose to do, and some have begun to incorporate Workplace Bullying into their basic manager training material like HR Compliance Basics, Intelligent Hiring, and Harassment Prevention. Managers need to establish appropriate workplace behavior by setting examples and clear expectations of what is acceptable and what is not.
Bullying Prevention:
Putting a stop to bullying is vital to the success of an organization. The financial cost of bullying can be great, including missed work days due to stress on employees, lowered production due to low morale, and high turnover due to the uncomfortable work environment.
Managers and Human Resource professionals should work together to develop a complaint reporting and investigation procedure, similar to a harassment investigation procedure, to ensure that as these reports come up, they are handled appropriately. Many organizations have declared that their workplaces have a “Zero Tolerance for Bullying” atmosphere, and where an allegation of bullying is made, the intention of the alleged bully is irrelevant, and will not be given consideration when meting out discipline.
With that being said, removing the bullies will not solve the problem. While the behavior may disappear, this fix can only be temporary, especially as organizations choose to hire more employees as the economy improves. New bullies emerge with new hires and long-time subordinate employees become bullying supervisors. This cycle will repeat itself unless a culture where employees and managers are treated with dignity and respect emerges.
For more information on human resource consulting or employer programs, contact Xenium HR at 503-612-1555 or visit www.xeniumhr.com. The staff at Xenium HR contributed to this article. It is intended as information only and is not a substitute for legal advice. Xenium HR is a professional employer organization specializing in strategic HR partnership with small and mid-sized businesses in Portland, Oregon.
How to Recognize and Prevent Bullying in the Workplace
