Behaving Badly

Once you enter your career, there are no lockers to get stuffed into, no gym class to fear, no poorly supervised playground for someone to be pushed around. But even without those school tyrant hotspots, the workplace isn’t immune to bullies.

Being a bully, or failing to stop an employee who is bullying others, can add financial strain to your company through lost productivity, lower retention and more worker’s compensation claims, experts say. It also could make it difficult to recruit employees if the bullying tarnishes your reputation.

“It would reduce productivity, it would increase turnover, it would kill morale, it would break down any type of teamwork,” says Libby Anderson, president of Naples-based consulting firm Human Resources Now. “A bully can obliterate any cohesive group because it’s so destructive.”

Surveys show that at least one-fourth of workers say they have been bullied in the workplace. A CareerBuilder survey found that 27 percent of workers say they’ve been bullied. Data from a 2010 Workplace Bullying Institute survey found that 54 million Americans, or 35 percent of the U.S. workforce, have experienced bullying. And 57 percent of participants in a 2008 study conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management and the Ethics Resource Center of Arlington, Va., confirmed witnessing abusive or intimidating behavior, which excluded sexual harassment.

The issue of workplace bullying can be misunderstood because the definition is murky. What one boss might consider tough love could be seen as bullying. An employee could construe it as bullying when he or she is being wrongly blamed for mistakes or being belittled in meetings.