Workplace Bloggers Anonymous

I’ve been accepted on a PGCE teacher training course this September!

My secretarial career is coming to an end! WHOOP WHOOP!  You can imagine the quiet Mexican wave being performed in firms of local solicitors.

Want to know the best part? I’m not actually going to be teaching in schools. Nope. In 2013 I’ll be teaching adults who need to improve their skills for the jobs market. Now, I know what you’re thinking, BBTB will immediately have to rename her classes ‘Workplace Bloggers Anonymous’.

Shame on you, cynics! I shall teach my students to master Twitter first.

I’m kidding! Just look what blogging and tweeting did for my secretarial career. It’s thanks to that I must radically improve my own skills for the jobs market. But outside school, it’ll be business as usual for Eva James - especially if it’s business as usual for UK employers.

Very best

BBTB

Family Business

I often warn of the dangers of sympathising with stressed colleagues, but there can’t be a greater example of this than the New York employment claim which hit the headlines this week.

In late 2010, Deborah Stevens volunteered one of her kidneys to her boss desperate for a kidney transplant. Whilst it’s an extraordinarily generous act, you can imagine how it came about. Watching her boss grow weaker, Stevens convinced herself it was the right thing to do. Stevens could potentially save a life. She’d be lauded by her firm. Deborah Stevens would be the self-sacrificing Atlantic Automotive Group heroine.

A complication arose; the first of many. Stevens’ kidney wasn’t a good match for her boss. Nevertheless, presumably having grown accustomed the idea and having had the battery of medical tests, she proceeded to donate her kidney to someone else on the waiting list.

Unfortunately, the major surgery left Stevens with nerve damage, digestive problems and depression.

On returning to work, Stevens expected her generous gesture to carry some weight; that her firm would be patient with her delayed recovery. She found the opposite. Her boss afforded her little empathy, complained about her sickness record and promptly moved her to another office. Then HR fired her.

Her union rep explained to the press: ‘Instead of being sympathetic, they were very hostile to her’.

Atlantic Automotive returned with the statement: ‘It is unfortunate that one employee has used her own generous act to make a groundless claim’. In one sentence, they reveal the truth of why this awful series of events occurred in the first place. Her firm accept the generosity of the act, but believe they owe her nothing.

The bottom line is that we spend a great deal of time with our colleagues, often seeing them as an extended family. Obviously, this is encouraged by firms. It’s nice for the employees and the company benefits in the long run.

But, as victims of bullying often find out, the big difference is that within your corporate ‘family’ there might be many people behind the scenes you don’t know so well. There might be many people involved in decision making who don’t have an ounce of support for you – whatever you’ve done for the company or whatever trouble you’re in.

   

And the more you buy into a ‘home from home’ or ‘second family’ employment dynamic, the more at risk you are of giving far more than you’ll ever receive. 

They're always colleagues, not cousins!

Very best

BBTB

WEEK 224 University of Life

 I’ve blogged about staff bullying in schools before, so it won’t come as a surprise that it goes on in Universities, despite the usual policies against it. As one website (bulliedacademics.blogspot.com) states:

'The bullying of academics follows a pattern of horrendous, Orwellian elimination rituals, often hidden from the public'. 

Nevertheless, there are some Universities that actually study workplace bullying. For example, the 8^th International Conference on Workplace Bullying and Harassment is being hosted this June by at the University of Copenhagen.

What do you mean you’ve never heard of it?

Okay. Then you must remember the 7^th International Conference on Workplace Bullying and Harassment hosted last June by the Centre for Research on Workplace Behaviours at the University of Glamorgan Business School, Cardiff?

Missed that one too, huh?

With the resources they have to collate valuable information, I can’t help feeling that University research facilities stop short. They’ll calculate the organisational and societal cost of bullying. They’ll tally up the risk factors. They’ll whisk their tape measures out and size workplace bullying up. And what do they do with their annual percentages and pie charts? I guess they’re published in some obscure academic journal with the conclusion: ‘Bullying costs companies and employees in a variety of ways.’ 

Maybe it’s not the lecturer's or student's job figure out how to stop it. Universities are, after all, academic institutions above businesses. It’s their job to come up with new and fashionable theory. It’s not a requirement to establish whether anything works.

But I can’t believe they’ll come up with anything truly groundbreaking unless they go further than creating graphs and posing pre-prepared questions to employees. They need to get hands-on with businesses.

They could, of course, start with their own.

Perhaps the first step for Universities is to recognise that they are businesses and that writing policies or even theoretical papers which prove little more than the writer thought about workplace bullying once-upon-a-time do little more than prove they’re closer to modern business than I’m sure they’d care to admit.

Very best

BBTB