Workplace Bullying

What is your experience of workplace bullying and what do you think a 'faithful' response should be?

One of the worst experiences of my life was being bullied by someone at work.  I didn’t work directly for him but he was more senior than me and we both worked for the same overall boss. He would make snide remarks to me and to others about my boss and turned on me when I wouldn’t join in.  It was the usual thing – sounds so insignificant when you try to describe it.  Everything I did was belittled, none of the criticism was serious enough to complain about and it was all couched in terms of ‘it’s for your own good’.  It was grinding me down and I’m usually quite a resilient person. He would invariably wait until I was on my own before he started.  This was often after normal working hours as my job involved lots of additional work.  I went home in tears on more than one occasion. 

The last time this happened, I was sobbing so much that I couldn’t drive out of the car park at work until I composed myself.  I turned on radio 4 to help me calm down and realised I had tuned into the middle of a story about someone being bullied at work.  I was soon engrossed and felt much less alone as I recognised so much about my own situation.  I made a point of listening to the other 4 episodes which were on at the same time each night of that week.  A different person told their story each night. The last question each night was ‘what had happened in the end’.  They  each said that they eventually had to leave their job and that find work elsewhere.  I was in despair.  Was this really the only way to deal with a bullying situation?

Episode 5 was a little different.  The person being interviewed was someone who admitted to being a bully.  It was a revelation.  He said it was the other person’s fault, they should have been able to stand up to him and he would have respected them for it if they had, he didn’t need weaklings like that in the company, it wasn’t his responsibility to tip-toe around sensitive people – he had a job to do.  He had absolutely no remorse for his actions, even when he knew how much people had been damaged at his hands.  He made light of the situation and accused the people he bullied of exaggerating, being manipulative, and trying to get out of trouble for not doing a very good job.  ‘In the end,’ he said, ‘they always leave’!.

I didn’t want to leave my job.  I loved it. So I had to find a way of managing the bullying.  I made up some rules, based on my experiences of being bullied by other children in the schoolyard. 

• I would tell the people I worked with that I was being bullied, by whom, and wouldn’t keep it secret. (bullying almost always happens in secret)
• I resolved not to be alone with the person and asked my staff not to leave the room if he came in or to join me if they saw him come into my room. (witnesses to conversations should I need them)
• I started to keep a record what had happened in a kind of diary if I felt he had bullied me again. ( contemporaneous record is powerful evidence that is hard to dispute – also got it out of my head and stopped it going around and around for days)
• Finally, after a few weeks, I told my boss what was happening (the equivalent to telling my big sister). 

My boss agreed not to punish him but to have a session around the table where I could explain (with some protection) what behaviour was making me unhappy.  My boss reinforced that it was unacceptable.  This was not easy.  The discussion was falsely restrained and uneasy but reasonably open.  He denied none of the behaviour but by way of explanation was able to bring up situations where he had felt bullied by my boss.  So we ended up with mutual agreements as to what was acceptable, and also a clear understanding of the consequences if it continued.  So an uneasy truce prevailed.

Years later, he would refer to the bullying as ‘the kind of difficulties you have in a marriage, full of ups and downs until you learn to trust each other’.  Must admit, it felt rather worse than a few ups and downs to me. 

An addendum: A year later, as Head of Equality  my team and I designed and introduced the first ever anti-bullying policy for the office – a policy that changed forever the macho culture of the office.

Workplace Bullying

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