According to data from the Employment Law Alliance, there’s a growing crop of women bullies showing up in the modern workplace. This is creating untold suffering for millions of women across the country. Check out these shocking facts,
40 percent of bullies in the workplace are women, and bullies target women over 70 percent of the time.
A staggering 45 percent of people said that they had been the victims of workplace bullying.
Female bullies tend to want to intimidate and dress down weaker women in their social group.
Being a victim of bullying can increase blood pressure, give women PTSD, induce panic attacks and depression and cause headaches.
Given how serious bullying is in the workplace, what can women do to fight back?
Seek Help
If you’re getting bullied at work or through social media sites like LinkedIn, it’s usually a sign of a deeper problem in the organisation. Bullies tend to rise up in organisations that don’t have the management skills to deal with the problem or whose HR teams don’t have a huge amount of control in the business. It’s a good idea in these situations to advocate for services to come into the business, like HR consultancy from Peninsula Group, and find out what’s causing the bullying. Professionals have the capabilities and toolsets to deal with these complex issues which can be hard to resolve internally once they get started.
Document Every Incident
Keeping a journal of all the things that have been said to your by a bully at work is a great way to protect yourself against future attacks. The journal can be used in two ways: you can either take it to your HR department and get them to investigate the matter further. Or you can use it as a bargaining chip, letting the bully know that you’ll move against them with the evidence that you’ve collected if they don’t start treating them with respect. Either way, with plenty of evidence at your disposal, you put yourself at an advantage.
Make Yourself More Valuable
A bully at work will often use the fact that you’re not performing as an excuse to bully and intimidate you. That’s why it’s a good idea to figure out how you can become more valuable to an organisation. The most valuable people are rarely bullied because losing those people will cost the organisation dear.
Learn About Your Company’s Bullying Policies
Every company will have an employee handbook, and in that handbook should be a list of procedures outlining what to do in the event of bullying. Study this and find out what your company’s official policy is with regard to bullying. Also, make sure that you’re up to date on occupational law and what it says about bullying at work.
Bullies Don’t Change;
Many women who are bullied at work think that they can somehow change the bully. But making people change their behaviour takes a lot of time, and most people aren’t equipped to do it, especially those who are victims of bullying. In these situations, it’s best to get management to help effect change. If they’re unwilling to do so, you may have to leave your job.
