If you thought bullying was something we all left behind in junior high school, you can count yourself lucky. According to the Workplace Bullying Institute, 19 percent of employees experience bullying in the workplace, and 60.4 million of us are affected by it.
Right now, workplace bullying laws don’t exist on a federal level. That said, abuse on the basis of race, gender or another protected class is illegal. But if the bully is just acting like a jerk, there’s no federal law prohibiting it. The situation is complicated further because bullying can be hard to define, and bullies are experts at making their victims look like the perpetrators.
That doesn’t mean employers shouldn’t do anything about it, though. It’s an important issue that can be damaging to your workplace and your employees.
To keep reading, click here: Do You Know the Dangers of Workplace Bullying?
Our natural instinct is to avoid conflict and unnecessary drama. However, when it comes to being bullied, the absolutely worst thing to do is to not stand up to it and oppose it as soon as possible. Allowing it to go on only empowers the bully and the bullying worsens. Organizations would do well to adopt the “No A**hole Rule,” in which rude, uncivil, behavior is simply not tolerated.
As someone who had to deal with a workplace bully, it’s even harder when the bully is one of three owners of the company you worked for and the other two owners know it’s happening, had it pointed out to them and continued to do nothing. I even added an amendment to the handbook about Workplace Bullying, had a manditory meeting with all employees (including this owner/bully) and this person still continued to do it. My only solution after that was to quit and the owner was so salty about me quitting, she walked me out the door as if I were trash (4 1/2 years of working there meant nothing to her). They say you should stand up to a bully, but she would have written anyone up (and has) for insubordination and flipped the tables making it all your fault. Some bullies (and I’m sure it’s rare) just can’t be dealt with.
Not rare enough, I assure you. Just when you think “you’ve seen it all” some clown proves that adage wrong even in the largest corporation.
As the two other commenters noted certain bullying will be ignored and tolerated by the powers that be and there’s nothing that can be done to stop this behavior in that workplace legally. The only recourse is to leave the toxic place and pray that Karma will some day occur. Getting blacklisted will occur in places like this if you push for justice.
Yup. In my daughter’s first job out of college, in a bank, there was a higher-up that would yell and throw things at people. When he stormed into her cubicle yelling and threw a pencil at my daughter, she went to her boss and said she was going to HR. His reply? “Well, others have done that and all I can say is, they’re gone and he’s still here.” She promptly found a new job.
I just left a job because the project sponsor was a 30-year company man apparently revered on the business side, but a snide, condescending toad to IT team. I left after 3 months.
I repeatedly emphasized in my exit interview with HR that I was leaving because of him, and that furthermore everyone around IT knew his reputation. I wasn’t going to stick around a company that tolerated such behavior, regardless of any official company slogans about respecting employees.
Good for you. Depending on the power disparity between the bully and the bullied, sometimes, that’s all you can do.