During my career, I have witnessed a great deal of bullying at work, it is a lot more common than you could possibly imagine.
Bullying is a serious contributing factor to poor mental health in the workplace, from my experience alone in a large UK company I would put it as the number one cause of ill health.
Bullying is not acceptable, however, companies spend more time covering it up than trying to resolve the issue.
If bullying is a part of the management culture of a company and it is not dealt with, new managers rising through the system will see that it is accepted and gets results and will follow their example, this is particularly relevant if they have a policy of promoting from within the company.
Many health and safety practitioners see their role as identifying hazards, noting the risks involved, making changes to the equipment and environment to make it as safe as reasonably practicable, and then training the staff how to do it, while this is an acceptable way of creating a safe environment it has its limitations.
***** You may notice I go off on a tangent every now and then, this is because health and safety is a vast subject with many important building blocks that all interlink, as time goes by I will cover many of the blocks and links but until then I will need to add more explanations to allow you to clearly understand my direction. *****
The way I and many of the experienced safety professionals work is by listening and talking to the people that do the job, don’t tell them how to do it, ask them how they do it. ask them why they do it that way, people do things a certain way for a reason, if you can understand why they do it a certain way you can devise a plan that they are more likely to follow because they were involved with the creation of the safe working practice.
Bullying is often caused when managers are pressured into getting a defined level of performance from their team, the middle manager may be unaware of the tactics being used to achieve these targets or may have moved up the ranks to that level by themselves bullying their team.
It is very easy to blame the manager for being the bully, as I mentioned earlier there is always a reason why people do things in a certain way, Listening and talking to the manager will give you a greater understanding of why they bully, it is easy to sack the manager for being a bully, but is it fair?
Why is that manager a bully? is it because he has copied other managers? is it because he has a poor role model to follow? finding the reason is the only way to resolve an issue, sacking and taking on a new manager may expose them to the same environment and end in the same results, it is far better to train a manager in good ways of managing and breaking the possible chain of poor culture experienced from promoting within.
Bullying costs companies a lot of money, not only from lost productivity but having to train new staff when the bullied person leaves, and increased workload for the other staff when the affected person takes time off for illness (often for mental health), I will add a post later with many ways bullying can cost the company.
I will update this blog later with ways to spot bullying, ways to spot mental health problems, and how to deal with each and many other issues in the workplace.