Tag Archives: bullying

Workplace bullying climbs after Christchurch earthquake

Under pressure even a decent boss can turn into a workplace bully. They use bullying as a misplaced coping strategy.

This may explain why Unite Union says it was flooded with calls from Christchurch workers in retail, fast-food, security and call centre industries who reported workplace bullying after the city was hit by two earthquakes.

A report on Radio New Zealand quoted union representative Matthew Jones who said reports of bullying increased from one or two cases a week to at least twelve and employers are not doing enough to train managers to handle the problem.

Canterbury Employers Chamber of Commerce chief executive Peter Townsend appears to agree with the coping strategy theory. He says there may have been bullying, but the issue is really to do with post-traumatic stress.

Workplace bullying is never good news and heaven knows the people of Christchurch have been through enough without having to deal with idiotic bullying bosses.

 

Is it hard to be ethical in a recession?

Mary K Pratt says companies find it harder to stick to ethical goals at a time are cost-cutting. See Ethics: Harder in a Recession?

Pratt misses the most important point. She worries about green initiatives and corporate responsibility programmes. I’m more concerned about day-to-day ethics.

When the recession hit New Zealand – a year or so before the story appeared – I noticed bosses quickly dropped ethical standards.

In particular I observed:

  • Lying – suddenly companies thought it was OK to tell lies. I sat in a management meeting where a senior manager scolded a colleague for not lying. This was despite the lie being so obviously untrue it would undermine his and the company’s credibility for a long time. Any gain from the lie – and I suspect there would have been none – would have been short-lived.
  • Cheating – I saw close up companies cheating others – acts of minor dishonesty such as charging for services not delivered.
  • Bullying – I heard bosses threaten employees with lost jobs if they didn’t do x, y or z. The threats and bullying made for a seriously disrupted and demoralised workplace.

What do you think, are ethics too hard when times are tough?

Dickensian dumbness

Yesterday I heard of an employer who boasts about deliberately hiring down-on-their-luck knowledge workers.  He offers workers low wages (monthly, not hourly), insecure contracts and bullies them into working long hours and performing ethically dubious tasks.

The conditions are Dickensian.

In other words a nightmare from a worker’s point of view. The manager thinks he is clever. Perhaps he is in the short-term. But it is a dumb strategy:

  • First, despite everything, while some workers are desperate now, most  still have options. Exploited workers will move on at the first opportunity. So an exploitative employer in any knowledge-based industry can expect to have an unstable workforce and be constantly getting new workers up to speed.
  • Second, the recession isn’t going to last forever. Sooner or later there will be another skill shortage. There are already signs of this in Australia. Employers with an exploitative reputation will struggle to find anyone willing to work for them. This applies to companies and to exploitative people.
  • Third, having downtrodden workers impacts on other staff. Those who can will ask themselves “is my turn next?” Staff will options will bail out.

If your employment strategy is to hire desperate people, you’re in trouble.

Psychopath boss

In Reservoir Dogs Harvey Keitel explains why you shouldn’t work with psychopaths.

He says; “A psychopath is not a professional. You can’t work with a psychopath, ’cause ya don’t know what those sick assholes are gonna do next.”

This applies in any workplace. Psychopaths do not make good colleagues. They make even worse bosses.

In Bosses behaving badly Jeanne-Vida Douglas writes about corporate psychopaths. They are rare, only one or two percent of the population, but they exist and there’s a chance you’ll encounter one during your career.

The best thing to do if you find yourself working for a corporate psychopath is to find another job. While that’s not easy in a recession, you may as well accept you’ll be out of the job sooner or later anyway because of the crazy behaviour, so get out with as much pride, integrity and sanity as you can salvage.

Douglas provides a check list to help recognise when a manager is a monster:

How to spot a psychopath boss

  • Lack of recognition of others in projects or achievements.
  • A sudden increase in absenteeism or illness in a particular division.
  • Attempts to isolate team members from each other and from other senior staff.
  • High staff turnover in a particular branch or division.
  • Constant questioning of others’ behaviour or capabilities either openly or privately.
  • A lack of respect for the intelligence or capabilities of others.
  • Obsession with gaining power over others.
  • Irrational requests, aggressive outbursts and rapid changes in demeanour.

Workplace bullying

As beating the office bully explains, workplace bullying is common. It could account for 40 percent of resignations.

Apart from being unjust and unpleasant for the people on the receiving end, bullying also damages the business where it takes place.

By definition, a company tolerating bullying cannot be meet its full productivity potential. And it wastes physical and emotional energy that could be put to better use.

For knowledge workers, who need mental space and a degree of inner peace to work the productivity loss is worse. Managers who indulge in bullying behaviour or turn a blind eye when others bully are less likely to get results.

Is office bullying making a comeback?

According to Is the office bully back? (no longer online) the economic crisis has unleashed a new wave of bad behaviour in the office. Hence this neat package of related stories on workplace bullying from bNet.

I don’t know if the credit crunch has triggered more bullying than usual – it was bad enough in the boom – but the tight job market means bullying victims have fewer escape routes. Bullying has always been one of the main reasons people leave jobs.

If you’re a manager worried about bullies you should read the complete set of stories. Every manager should read the workplace bullying primer.

I like this list from the how to handle a workplace bully section:

How managers unwittingly encourage bullying

  1. Pit workers against each other or emphasize a competitive work style.
  2. Have a lax management style, so that employees must fill in the blanks themselves on what is acceptable and what is not.
  3. Make unreasonable demands and goals of employees and managers.
  4. Fail to give supervisors the authority to reprimand problem workers.
  5. Set impossible deadlines or provide too little funding to accomplish a goal.

Useful anti-bullying tips from the BBC

BBC news: How to resolve bullying at work has useful tips including:

Keep a detailed diary of every incident. Note down dates, times, the people involved and what happened – this could be crucial evidence for an employment tribunal.

These are what lawyers call contemporaneous notes. Basically, you should write notes close to the time something happens and include the time and date. Here’s a good piece on how to take these note as a PDF document.

Busting the office bully

How to bust the office bully is another useful PDF download. Not surprisingly this 2007 report from The Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University reads like an academic project complete with citations. The document explains techniques allowing victims of workplace bullying to tell their stories to other people in plausible ways, this is the first step towards dealing with the problems of bullying.

Australian employment law and bullying

In this simple, but effective post, New South Wales lawyer Frank Egan points out employers risk legal exposure if they tolerate bullying. In plain English this means bosses who allow bullying can end up being sued by their employees.

No complaints doesn’t mean no problems

Britain’s Andrea Adams Trust provides sound advice for employers and employees who face bullying, including yet another downloadable PDF fact sheet. There’s also a telephone hotline for people living in the UK. It even manged to enlist Prime Minister Gordon Brown as a supporter of its Ban Bullying at Work Day campaign. In a recent press release, the trust quoted the results of an on-line survey of 10,000 people, including:

  • 92 percent of workers felt they are bullied.
  • 49 percent of those indicated that their immediate manager was the bully.
  • 56 percent of  respondents stated  that  in  their workplace bullying  is a serious problem.
  • 47.8 percent of  respondents  stated  that  when  they  made  a  formal  complaint
  • procedures were not followed correctly.

Beyond bullying

Beyond bullying is a New Zealand-based website which advocates “zero tolerance to workplace bullying in New Zealand”. There’s also a book. While useful with links to Australian and New Zealand legal material, the website appears  neglected, the most recent material I could find was from 2006. Like most of the other workplace bullying sites, there’s a PDF download, but unlike the other documents, this reads more like a PowerPoint presentation than a tract.

The presentation points bullying is due to weak, and not strong, management.

NZ Department of Labour

This 2005 report (downloadable PDF) written by New Zealand’s Department of Labour defines workplace bullying in legal terms and then looks at the rights of employees and employers when it takes place.

NZ Public Service Association

It shouldn’t come as a surprise a union produced one of the best New Zealand sources of material on workplace bullying.  For example, the downloadable workplace bullying is not OK is one of the most comprehensive and readable documents I’ve seen on the subject. For example its definition of what workplace bullying (called harassment in the material) is not:

  • Friendly banter, light-hearted exchanges, mutually acceptable jokes and compliments
  • Friendships sexual or otherwise, where both people consent to the relationship
  • Issuing reasonable instructions and expecting them to be carried out
  • Warning or disciplining someone in line with organisation policy
  • Insisting on high standards of performance in terms of quality, safety and team cooperation
  • Legitimate criticisms about work performance (not expressed in a hostile harassing way)
  • Giving negative feedback including in a performance appraisal and requiring justified performance
  • improvement
  • Assertively expressing opinions that are different from others
  • Free and frank discussion about issues or concerns in the workplace, without personal insults
  • And targeted EEO policies, parental leave  provisions or reasonable accommodation and provision of work
  • aids for staff with disabilities.

Five HR responses to workplace bullying

Finally, on a lighter note, Scottish Boomerang has outlined five hr responses to workplace bullying including the mafioso:

Perhaps the worst stance, the Mafioso HR Department knows there is a problem with workplace bullying and actively participates or supports the abuse by bringing false, fabricated or unnecessary proceedings against the targets of bullying, supporting the culprits, joining in “the fun”. Their typical way is to issue threats to targets and abuse procedure. They are the harbingers of doom to any firm and they ride in on the pale horse.

Oh, yes, you know who you are. And so do we. We can tell by the attrition rates, the number of lawsuits, and the fact that you can smell the fear and tension the moment you walk through the door.

Beating office bullying

People think workplace bullying is about blue-collar workers. But surveys show workplace bullying goes on in every industry, though its nature changes.

Underlining the white-collar bullying problem a 2002 report by Australia’s APESMA professional women’s network says one-third of survey respondents have been bullied at work.

In 2000, Australia’s Office of the Employee Ombudsman says it received more than 500 complaints a year on workplace bullying related issues and that number is increasing each year.

In its January 1999 Australian Jobs Index Survey, Morgan and Banks reported 10.4% of employers believe bullying is increasing at work.

According to England’s The Daily Telegraph, an online poll of 10,000 people found that 92 per cent believe they are the victims of workplace taunts and intimidation, with 56 per cent believing it is a serious problem in their office, shop or factory.

International research and anecdotal evidence from Australia and New Zealand suggests the worst industries for bullying are education, healthcare, social services and voluntary work.

The Morgan and Banks survey identified tourism as a problem industry. There’s also evidence  bullying is more widespread in the government than in private industry, though this may reflect the willingness of government workers to report bullying.

Until recently there wasn’t much formal awareness of bullying as a problem. To some extent the increasing number of reported cases reflects the fact that employees are only just becoming used to being able to report bullying.

Outsourcing and cost-cutting can trigger bullying

White-collar unions say outsourced operations and understaffed workplaces are ideal breeding grounds for middle management bullies. There’s evidence bosses, who are themselves under undue pressure, turn into workplace bullies as a misguided coping strategy.
Bullying takes a number of forms. At one end of the spectrum are malicious rumours, over critical work evaluation and physical or verbal isolation. At the more extreme end there are direct verbal threats and physical violence. Deaths as a result of workplace bullying are thankfully rare, but they do happen.

Bullying has been a feature of the workplace for most of human history. No doubt when the senior public works managers of Ancient Egypt floated down the Nile on their annual off-site management brainstorming session some bright spark figured whipping might incentivise pyramid-building.

Bullying kills productivity

Today’s more enlightened managers recognise a happy workforce is productive and bullying has a direct negative impact on productivity. There are estimates of the potential costs of workplace bullying, but ultimately it’s impossible to measure the economic cost.

Other facts about workplace bullying.

  • Most research says that men and women face bullying in roughly equal numbers and that both men and women bully others in roughly equal numbers. Women are more likely to report a bullying incident – men are less willing to admit to being intimidated.
  • Same sex bullying is far more common that intra-sex bullying.
  • Victims can lose self-esteem and blame themselves for the problem.
  • About one victim in 100 either attempts or succeeds to commit suicide.
  • 90% of calls to Britain’s workplace bullying hotline came from white-collar workers – only 5% involved manual workers.
  • About 10% of all reported cases result in legal action – this proportion is increasing.
  • Two-thirds of the members of Unison (the UK civil service union) say they have witnessed workplace bullying.
  • Most bullied people report damage to their health
  • The overwhelming majority of bullies are repeat offenders.
  • In most cases more senior managers say they are aware that the bullying took place.
  • Bullying is responsible for around one resignation in four.