Bullying

When we talk about bullying these days, we’re usually referring to bullying in the schoolyard. But bullies have always been around. Forty years ago, women were bullied in the workplace, and there’s still workplace bullying going on. Anytime that there is a power issue is involved, there is a potential for bullying, and bullying comes in many ways.

Sometimes, in the 21^st century, the media has been blamed for the stories about bullying. People say well it really hasn’t gotten any worse, and they remember their own childhood in the schoolyards where they might have been picked at or involved in fist fights. The workplace always used to be a place where people kept their counsel and didn’t talk about problems they had, except with their immediate family and friends. But studies have shown that workplace bullying has increased by 100% since the turn of the 21^st century.

It’s one of those delicate issues where people say they’re being bullied and those who argue against the growth of workplace bullying say, “Well really it hasn’t grown, it’s just that people are more used to playing the victim.” A lot of workplace workers have grown up in schoolyards in educational systems where there was a big pressure against bullying, and a lot of education about how to deal with bullies.

They lose what the naysayers refer to as the ability to stand up for themselves, or the ability to take responsibility. It’s a situation where people who might have been subjected to negative events cannot accept any kind of criticism, even constructive criticis. Then they get into a workplace and when they’re told to do something, or they’re criticized for not doing something correctly, they view it as bullying. That’s one side of the argument.

The other side is that instead of the world after computers turning into a paperless society, and computers allowing for more efficient work to be done, and therefore more leisure time, computers have actually changed the entire face of work so that people are now expected to do more with less help. There was one organization that I’ve worked for, it was a large organization, that had a little over 1,000 employees in our branch, and of those employees, 72 were executive assistants. When the management decided to reinvent the entire workplace, they laid off 70 of the 72 assistants, and these two assistants who were left still had to turn out as much work as had been previously turned out.

However, a lot of the managers were expected to do some of their own work even though they weren’t trained to use computers. Some of them couldn’t even keyboard, so writing their own letters and making their own phone calls became a very time consuming process, and also took them away from their own expertise. If you hire, for instance, a dedicated electrical engineer who has superior expertise in that field, and you expect him or her to be doing their own support work, then you’re paying a lot of money for their time in writing a letter, which would take a well trained executive assistant very little time. Because here, she would know exactly what to do, and the electrical engineer is being paid a lot more than the assistant will be paid to do a job that would probably take him ten times longer, and be of less quality.

So there are some changes in the workplace where people feel that they’re being abused, taken advantage of and, well, bullied. However, a lot of the bullying that’s being claimed is bullying related to their religion, their sexual orientation, even their race, and many times they’re bullied. So the entire bullying situation is  much broader than the schoolyard.