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Facing up to the brutal reality of bullying in the workplace WORKING
Sunday Herald, The, Aug 26, 2007 by IAIN S BRUCE
HAVE you ever been singled out by a colleague, undermined at every juncture and treated with the kind of casual savagery that leaves you drained of confidence and dreading the dawn of each new working day? It may be brutal, ugly and completely unacceptable, but every day Scottish workers are enduring bullying at the hands of the people they work with.
Louisa Fletcher knows all about this.
Now a successful entrepreneur, she was barely settling into her first job as an IT programmer when rejecting the advances of the boss saw her become the focus of a firestorm of intimidation and pressure.
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Undermined, humiliated and dressed down daily over matters that would have been ignored if they'd involved any other employee in the company, she endured months of illtreatment before finally cracking and handing in her notice.
"It was horrible, really ghastly, " she said. "I was absolutely miserable and didn't know what to do. Matters were only brought to a head when I was pushed up against a wall and assaulted.
"You can't switch off and leave that kind of thing at the office. It's the sort of problem that follows you home and impacts on everything you do."
It sounds extreme, but according to new research from the Dignity at Work Partnership, 4.7 million British workers are currently suffering at the hands of office bullies. The survey, co-sponsored by the DTI, reveals that more than 50% of UK employees - equivalent to some 14.5 million people - have been bullied at some point in their working lives.
The report also found that cyberbullying is increasingly becoming a problem in the workplace, with a fifth of respondents claiming to have been bullied by email in their current or previous jobs, and 6.2% saying they have been bullied via a text message. The increased use of communications tools such as BlackBerries is also making digital harassment a problem outside working hours, according to 13% of respondents.
In addition, the study reveals that a quarter of UK employees have at some point been forced to cancel their longawaited annual leave following demands from their employers.
According to its results, 30% of men and 24% of women in the UK report having been placed under sufficient pressure by senior colleagues to force them to cancel time booked off for a holiday from work.
"Bullying in the workplace can destroy peoples' lives, " says Mandy Telford, Dignity At Work co-ordinator for trade union Unite. "It also has a direct impact on an organisation's bottom line, and we hope that making the financial impact clear will help management and HR staff build a business case for tackling the issue.
"Our project aims to tackle workplace bullying in partnership with employers. We hope that showing the financial impact of bullying will encourage them to develop their own anti-bullying policies, benefiting both their staff and their bottom line."
THAT'S all well and good, but many victims of office intimidation feel that they are powerless to act, particularly if the aggressor holds a senior position in the corporate food chain. Fletcher accepts this, but draws on her second experience of bullying to provide evidence of what can be done.
Having fallen foul of a fellow director at a property company, she found herself and several other employees the subject of a passive-aggressive campaign in which their antagonist seized every opportunity to unnecessarily criticise, single out and defame her chosen victims.
It was blatant, but the problem was that each separate incident seemed a minor thing in its own right that, if raised through official channels, would almost certainly have been dismissed as over-sensitivity.
So, together with fellow staff, Fletcher began keeping a log in which they recorded the details of each incident. Simultaneously switching to a policy of only communicating with her aggressor in writing, she quickly assembled a welter of damning evidence and submitted it to the board.
A subsequent investigation found that of 100 employees, 46 felt they had been bullied by the person in question.
Reasoning that this must be a major factor behind the company's high staff turnover the board acted, and the bullying director was shown the door.
"Bullying can only continue if you let it, " said Fletcher, now managing director of PropertyPriceAdvice. co. uk. "You need to collate evidence and enlist the support of fellow staff, but if you call a bully's bluff and refuse to be treated in that manner, you're halfway to solving the problem.
"No company wants people dreading coming into work every morning. If people are not happy they're not productive either, and this just isn't a winning commercial formula. My experience shows that if you make a stand and prove to senior management that there is a problem, they will almost certainly act to stop it."
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