This post extends my previous post Assholes in the Workplace.
Dr Babara Griffin, from the University of Western Sydney, has recently studied the impact of bad manners in the workplace. Dr Griffin used data from Hewitt Associates' Best Employer Survey of more than 54,000 employees from 179 organisations across Australia and New Zealand. From this data she found that one in five employees experience a significant incident of bad manners at work once a month.
Bullying has a large impact on employee engagement including whether an employee will stay in an organisation, will speak positively about the organisation and more importantly whether the employee will go that extra mile when needed. Bullying also causes psychological distress and poor physical health. Bullying not only impacts the person being bullied but other people who see this occurring in the workplace, as well as family and friends.
I have started to read the The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t. There is an example in the book of one bully costing an organisation US$160000; 60% of recovery was deducted from his year-end bonus. The cost represented the time spent by others in dealing with the bully and assisting victims, counseling sessions, recruiting and inducting new people (due to attrition) and training. This amount could have been higher if a person being bullied decided to sue the organisation for psychological distress.
Imagine you have a number of bullies in your organisation... What this is costing and what is the impact on your employer brand?
In the book Bob Sutton suggests ten steps to enforcing the No Asshole Rule. These are:
- Say the rule, write it down and act on it.
- Assholes will hire other assholes therefore ensure you have civilized people interviewing.
- Get rid of assholes fast.
- Treat certified assholes as incompetent employees. Do not reward them if they are doing extraordinarily well but persistently bully others.
- Power breeds nastiness.
- Embrace the power-performance paradox but do everything you can do downplay and reduce status differences.
- Manage moments - not just practices, policies and systems.
- Model and teach constructive confrontation.
- Adopt the one asshole rule (apparently when there are rare occasions of bad behaviour it reminds people how not to behave).
- The bottom line - link big policies to small decencies.
So, what can you do? Ensure you have bullying and harassment policies, but more importantly ensure everyone in your organisation is expected and does walk the talk. If they don't then do something about it. Taking a stand against bullying requires strong leadership from everyone in the organisation from the CEO down.
