Spotting the 5 most common signs of workplace bullying
September 10, 2010 by Jared BilskiPosted in: Communication tips, Efficiency, In this week's e-newsletter, Latest news & views, Management issues
In addition to wreaking havoc on morale and productivity, workplace bullying may even land complacent employers in legal trouble.
Reason: New York and 11 other states are considering legislation that would protect workers from abusive bosses and co-workers.
To prevent workplace bullying, employers should be well-versed in all its forms. Aside from physical intimidation, here are five of the most common forms of workplace bullying to look out for:
- Verbal insults of employees. This type of bullying is one of the most common forms — i.e., Bob calls Sean “stupid” because of a mistake, etc.
- Slandering a co-worker’s name. Telling people that Marnie’s sleeping around too much, or Lloyd has a drinking problem.
- Excluding certain workers. Being excluded from the majority of departmental activities can have an extremely negative effect on workers.
- Unwelcome contact. It’s obvious that excessive touching is completely unacceptable, but staring at employees in a lewd manner also falls into this category.
- Unreasonable management. This takes place when a supervisor saddles a co-worker with an inordinate amount of work or a disciplinary action is unwarranted.
Readers, are we missing any? Share them with us in the Comments section.
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Tags: Abusive bosses, Legal trouble, New York, Signs, Slandering, Verbal insults, Workplace bullying
September 9th, 2010 at 12:15 pm
another suggestion of bullying:
Telling the employee to keep their mouth shut, when offering a suggestion or trying to defend oneself.
Favoring other employees and allowing them privileges that all employees in the dept are not allowed.
reprimanding the employee for receiving “personal” phone calls when the employee is not receiving personal phone calls but the co-worker is.
September 13th, 2010 at 9:54 am
Having a co-worker become loud and aggressive anytime you question her about anything because she is threatened very easily, and prone to sarcasm. And then to add further insult to injury she runs in to any manager and acts like a victim when in fact she is the one victimizing, but because she is an otherwise reliable and knowlegable employee she is allowed time after time to get away with it.
September 13th, 2010 at 2:40 pm
I used to work in a place where a manager bullied her subordinates. I kept wanting to include the manager in training issues but co-workers kept begging me not to so that no one would “get yelled at.” I was forced to bring the issue to the personnel manager because I heard the same thing from 3 different people in 3 different positions (tech, CSR & producer). That manager seemed much nicer the next week, so maybe it worked.
I’m sure this sounds like tattling but after keeping 4 different training issues hidden from her for 6 months I’d had enough – it just didn’t seem like we were running a good business!