When many people think of bullying, they think of the schoolyard, but it also occurs frequently in the workplace: being scheduled at annoying times, being structurally ‘forgotten’ during coffee or being addressed with an offensive nickname.
“People don’t realize how big the problem is,” says Laura Willemse, chairman of the Bullying in the Workplace foundation.
It’s anti-bullying week. While campaigns to combat bullying have been running in schools for years, preventive policies are lacking in the workplace. According to Willemse, bullying is still a taboo, which means that victims do not dare to talk about it and bystanders do not dare to intervene. “There is always talk about a bully, but people don’t realize that it is group behavior. The entire department knows who the bully is.”
Discuss
In order to remove bullying from the taboo atmosphere, according to confidential counselor Bram Zuidland of SpecialistenNet, it is important that human resources or management communicate that bullying behavior is not accepted. “To ensure that it is reported, companies must make it a topic of discussion. Now they often keep their mouths shut. The victim is afraid that a report will make things worse, while the close colleague fears he or she will become the next target.”
Figures on the number of victims of bullying behavior in the workplace range from 500,000 (TNO labor monitor 2021) to 2.3 million (CNV 2021). “In the CNV study, the question was broader and also concerned issues such as intimidation and discrimination,” Willemse explains.
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Every employer is obliged to measure the psychosocial workload of employees once a year. “In practice, this does not always happen,” says Zuidland, who has developed an online screening with SpecialistenNet. According to Willemse, many employee satisfaction surveys lack questions about bullying. “Sexual harassment is asked, although in percentage terms it occurs much less often. But bullying, just like sexual harassment, can have major consequences for the victim.”
Absence
In addition to the fact that bullying can cause emotional or psychological problems for the victim, the company itself can also suffer significant damage. In the study, TNO assumes that bullying in the workplace causes up to four million additional days of absence per year; an estimated damage of 2.3 billion euros. Willemse: “Moreover, bullying can sour the working atmosphere that the production of an entire department decreases.”
The bully is relatively often a manager, the experts see. “Some people feel stronger by putting someone else down,” says Willemse. Zuidland: “When you give people power, strange things sometimes happen. For example, a manager did not agree that a truck driver for the company doctor had to do temporary replacement work. He therefore did not give him alternative work, but made him sit in the canteen every day for eight hours.”