Bully for Me

After a rather a long and tedious series of recent interactions with someone who works in another part of this university, I had one of those philosophical conversations with myself.   The conversation went like this:  can someone be a bully if the intended recipient of the bullying isn’t cowed or succumbs to the wants (or should I say rants) of the “bully”?

Eventually, I shared this philosophical question with others:  can bullying exist without recognition on the part of the target?  Unfortunately, I rarely got to have that conversation, as practically everyone of whom I asked the question wanted to tell me about the bully in her/his workplace.  I was dumbfounded!

According to the Workplace Bullying Institute (yup! there really is such a place!), up to 1/3 of workers may be the victim of workplace bullying.  (Bullyingstatistics.org–yes, there is a whole website dedicated to bullying statistics of all sorts—reports that in 2010 about approximately one in seven students in grades K through 12 is either the victim of a bully or a bully him/herself, and about 71% reported bullying as an “on-going problem.”)  Interestingly, approximately 20% of workplace bullying crosses the line and becomes harassment, a behavior for which every personnel handbook spells out a protocol for how to report and address harassment.  How many employee handbooks address what to do about a bully in the workplace?

It should come as no surprise that bullying in the workplace occurs, or that it occurs to the degree that it does.  After all, a schoolyard bully unchecked grows up to be an unchecked workplace bully.   The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry estimates that almost half of all children will be the victims of a bully at school at some point during their K through 12 years and 10% of children are victims of regular bullying.

That’s a lot of people to age into workplace bullies.  Look around.  If you hadn’t noticed them before, my bet is you do now.  And, no, the bullying behavior it isn’t just Tom being Tom (The New York Times found that 60% of workplace bullies are men, and are equal opportunity bullies) or Mary being Mary (who only bullies other women).  It is bullying.  And bullying, just like harassment, needs to be addressed in employee handbooks.

The consequences of this behavior in the workplace are real to individuals and organizations, alike.  Victims experience stress and anxiety and may suffer from depression, missed workdays and productivity slippage.  Some experts even attribute PTSD to victims of workplace bullying.   Companies suffer as well and can experience an increase in turnover rates (the bully doesn’t leave, the victims do), a lowering of production, an employee(s) with whom no one else wants to work, and the increase costs of providing health care as bullied employees use more and more health benefits.

As I came to understand, that which started for me as an internal dialogue that was part blowing off steam was really a most serious problem.  And then I discovered a whole other aspect of workplace bullying, thanks to researchers Emily Nicklett and John Tropman, both at the University of Michigan, who put the label of workplace bullying on an age old practice at nonprofits:  social exploitation–the “art” of paying ridiculously low wages, or no wages, so that others can get richer.

While I continually work to impress upon all who will listen that the need to underpay nonprofit employees is a myth–built on the extremely faulty thinking that those who work in this sector do solely out of pure love of mission and have no need to earn a livelihood, let alone a competitive livelihood–and we must be providing competitive compensation, I confess that I had never, until now, thought of it as workplace bullying—which it absolutely is.  When others–be it the executive director who receives a disproportionately higher salary than the rest of the employees; or funders who insist that only 10% of her/his/its dollars may go to overhead costs; or board members who have bought the myth hook, line and sinker–“insist” on keeping nonprofit employees earning grossly inadequate salaries and/or increasingly encourage reliance on volunteers–the lowest paid of all staff–nonprofits are engaging one of the worst forms of workplace bullying possible.  And yet, I am betting that few of the bullies would self-identify as such!

There simply is no excuse for allowing bullying of any kind to exist in the workplace.  We didn’t stop them in the schoolyard or the home; so we better stop them in the workplace.