Bullying in the workplace often takes subtle forms that are not always obvious to identify. The HR Lab has tried to put together a simple list that you can easily include in your company's anti-harassment and anti-bullying policies.
Verbal Intimidation
- Moral harassment or scapegoating.
- Joking in order to offend, verbally or by e-mail.
- Scream or swear.
- Constantly criticizing a person.
- To belittle a person's opinions.
- Insulting someone with sarcasm, teasing.
- Spreading rumours, making threats, making negative references to one's culture, ethnicity, race, religion, gender or sexual orientation.
- Making unwanted sexual comments.
Social Intimidation
- Exclude a person voluntarily from the work team.
- Humiliate others with public gestures or graffiti intended to demean them.
- Spreading malicious rumours, gossip or innuendo.
- Exclude or isolate a person socially during outdoor activities.
Physical or Intrusive Intimidation
- Intimidate a person with your gaze, do not yield or feign a physical collision with the person.
- Physically abuse or threaten to abuse.
- Altering a person's personal effects or work equipment.
- Move the workplace to a degrading location.
- Hitting, pushing, pinching, chasing, shoving, coercing, destroying or stealing property.
- Eating someone else's lunch and faking the mistake.
Cyberbullying
- Interfering in a person's private life by bothering, spying on or stalking them.
- In or out of the office, use the Internet or text messaging to intimidate, repress, spread rumours or make fun of someone.
- Tracking people on social networks.
- Tracking down a single person's work with spyware.
- Reading an employee's e-mails and then blackmailing or intimidating them.
- Sending inappropriate images to a person to make fun of their reactions.
Workplace bullying
- Destroying or consciously obstructing someone's work.
- Removing computer access or not informing people of important meetings to make them look bad.
- Withdrawing responsibility without good reason.
- Impose impossible deadlines that will lead the person to fail.
- Constantly changing work instructions or asking to do the same work over and over again without good reason.
- Withholding necessary information or giving the wrong information in an appropriate manner.
- Imposing excessive tasks or a disadvantageous workload on a person (causing unnecessary stress).
- Assigning an insufficient workload - creating a sense of incompetence.
- Punish or reprimand without reason (undeserved).
- Refuse requests for training, vacation or promotion.
- Promoting people less competent than you as a form of retaliation.
Finally, intimidation is useless to anyone. Also include in your company policies rules of conduct on social networks and don't skimp on corrective measures for stalkers. Because victims will soon go to work for your competitor in a better environment.
When harassment is tolerated, the entire employer brand and the organization are negatively affected. It is the job of human resources to ensure order and fairness. Create the best place in the world to work safely and without moral violence. Make it your mission!
