Bullies on the job

by Jocelyn Maminta, wtnh.com

It is a childhood issue now rearing its ugly head in the workplace. Bullies in the office are much more common than you may think.

When a child gets bullied on the playground, a teacher can step in. But what happens when you’re the target of an abusive boss?

“She would look at me and say I was pretty stupid,” said ‘Lee-Ann’, a bullied professional. “She was demeaning, she was belittling, condescending.”

‘Lee-Ann’ is a highly educated medical professional who wished to remain anonymous. She talked with News Channel 8 about the boss who bullied her.

“My self-esteem was always shot down every single solitary day,” Lee-Ann said.

Increasingly, more and more people are finding themselves the target of abusive supervisors and co-workers.

“We hear about this almost on a daily basis,” said Michelle Lieblein of Longview Associates.

Longview Associates is a consulting firm that provides employee assistance programs, or E.A.P.

“We help them to define it, we help them to teach them strategies on who to approach to discuss this and get this investigated in their organization,” Lieblein explained.

But such programs are limited to what they can do. They can not mediate or advocate on behalf of the victim.

“We’re supposed to be a neutral party,” Lieblein said. “What we can do is arm them with the types of information they should have to go to an employer.”

Counseling is part of the strategy.

“Bullying is not always about what you’re doing, it’s also what you are not doing,” explained Dr. Elaine Ducharme of the CT Psychological Association.

Dr. Ducharme also advises companies that are trying to banish bullies.

“It might be you excluded somebody from a meeting, you are leaving their name off an important e-mail, you are avoiding giving them information so they can actually complete the job properly,” Dr. Ducharme said.

Work at Robert J. Reby and Company, a financial management firm, can be extremely intense. But the company has been singled out for its healthy workplace.

“It’s something I have to be conscious of and work hard at,” said Bob Reby.

Reby has 14 employees and with his human relations coordinator, Laurie Ham, they make it their mission to retain the people hired.

“I wish more people were willing to knock at my door and not feel like they are bothering me. You say — hey my door is open but its not really open until people actually believe it,” Reby said.

But for Lee-Ann, the door was not open. She eventually reported her bullying boss.

“Her boss told me that she’d been there 30 years and that she’s not going any where so maybe I needed to think about going somewhere else,” Lee-Ann said.

Lee-Ann did find another job and is now in a more positive working environment.

This year a law to make workplace bullying illegal failed in the General Assembly.