Bullying employees can cost your company
By Jay MacDonald • Bankrate.com

You may have a cancer growing within your company right now and not even know it. Left untreated, it could be devastating, even terminal.

That cancer is a bully.

Legislation has made other forms of workplace harassment illegal, but bullying behavior remains business's dirty little secret, a form of emotional, psychological and sometimes physical abuse that can turn making a living into a living hell.

"I think this has a strong financial impact if it's not addressed," says Gary Namie, a psychologist and founder of the nonprofit Campaign Against Workplace Bullying.

"It creates a dysfunctional workplace that is never going to be able to deal with a customer because it's focused on itself, it has turned inward," says Namie. "I think it can break a small business, primarily through turnover, lost productivity, litigation and health costs."

Crossing the line
Bullies are a classic case of nature meets nurture, according to Karlin Sloan, president of The Propeller Group, a New York City company that specializes in organizational development.

"Certain behaviors are tough behavior, but are perfectly acceptable and appropriate, but bullying is where you draw the line," says Sloan. "All bullying behavior comes from something that's not being expressed authentically.

"It's anger or fear feelings that are just being put out on whoever is the target. They displace all their anger on you and that is absolutely unfair."

Invite this troubled person into a corporate culture that either ignores or tacitly approves aggressive behavior and you could have a bully on your hands.

"We define bullying as health-endangering mistreatment. If it's not that, it's something short of that. It's office politics and maneuvering and gamesmanship," says Namie. "Most bullies are not psychopaths, they are not wackos, they are not mentally ill. They are just aggressive people who are very astute at reading the cues."

Although workplace bullies may take several forms, they share one common goal: to advance their position in the company at the expense of a co-worker, often called the target.

Targeting the top
According to Namie, the destructive thing about bullies from an organizational point of view is that they tend to target your best and brightest workers: those who are technically competent, independent, possess good social skills and have strong ethics (and thus may be whistleblowers).

"It's much different than schoolyard bullying," he says. "This target isn't the kid with the Coke-bottle glasses. This is the worker you want, as an owner. And those are the people who are getting driven out because they are so threatening to the petty-minded one."

Targets tend to be reluctant to report bullying, primarily for fear of retribution, but also because they run the risk of being labeled a whiner or a snitch, or losing their job outright if the bully is their superior.

There is little evidence that workplace bullies go on to commit workplace violence. According to the Centers for Disease Control's National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), co-workers commit fewer than one in 10 acts of workplace violence.

Their targets, however, are another story. If the stress of facing a bully at work every day becomes too much, the bullied may eventually snap.

"Most targets are as equally likely to commit suicide as violence to others," says Namie. "They turn inward, they blame themselves, they become depressed, they have post-traumatic stress. It's more like domestic violence. They will often say they've been raped, intellectual rape."

Beating the bully
Chances are, you won't even know you have a bully until a targeted employee comes to you. When that finally happens, what do you do?

"First, determine the level of the problem," says Sloan. "You may have two people coming to you saying, 'Jim is mean!' Well, what exactly does that mean? You have to do a little research to find out if it's truly bullying or just an interpersonal conflict."

Even if the bullying is not illegal under current workplace legislation, Namie says it's easy to make a business case to move swiftly against it.

"Do a cost-benefit analysis of tolerating this person while all the other good, talented people you spent good money to train flee," he says. "Is it worth keeping the one when you've lost the 25 in the last three years?"

The next step, according to Namie, is to bring the bully behind closed doors and call him on his behavior, making it clear that his job may be in jeopardy if it continues.

But never try to bring the bully and his target together, Namie advises.

"Traditional conflict resolution is based on rationality. Bullies are not rational," he says. "What they will do is sit right in that meeting and lie.

"In fact, they will come to that meeting with their case made that they've been singled out, they've been picked on, they've been discriminated against."

Enforce existing workplace policies
Once the bullying problem is acknowledged, use practical, day-to-day business tools to deal with it.

If you have an anti-harassment policy, make it into an omnibus policy covering all forms of harassment, not just the illegal ones.

If the bully is confrontational or denies the behavior, begin your documentation just as you would for a non-performing employee. Put the person on notice, explain what is expected, define what is not tolerated, and spell out the consequences of further bullying.

And if firing becomes inevitable, take the normal precautions:

• Have others present when you fire the person.
• Escort the dismissed employee from the building.
• Delete the person's password from the computer system beforehand.
• Time the firing to your advantage (late Friday is best).
• Make sure you have the documentation to prove that you tried to assist the person.

Remember, your employees are watching your response.

No legal recourse -- yet
Namie's organization is working to pass an anti-bullying law similar to child abuse and domestic violence legislation. Until that happens, bullies will remain a dark and destructive force in business.

"OSHA sticks to physical safety. British law addresses both physical and psychological safety in the workplace," he says. "In America, psychological safety is for pansies. The mentality is, 'Get tough, get a thicker skin, that's why they call it work.' "

Despite the difficulty of dealing with a bully, the very worst thing you can do is ignore such a person. Bullies rarely move on, but your best employees will.

"Just because it's not illegal, don't ignore it," warns Namie. "That's how managers and owners fall into a trap. They say, 'We don't have a policy that covers it, it's not illegal, just go away.'

"That doesn't mean it's not an issue. That just means it hasn't been addressed by the law."

Jay MacDonald is a contributing editor based in Florida.

-- Posted: Oct. 19, 2001