Sexual Harassment Training: Facing up to the brutal reality of bullying and sex harassment in the workplace

Have you ever been singled out by a colleague, undermined at every juncture and treated with the kind of casual savagery or sexual harassment that leaves you drained of confidence and dreading the dawn of each new working day? It may be brutal, ugly and completely unacceptable, but every day Scottish workers are enduring bullying and workplace harassment in a hostile work environment at the hands of the people they work with.

Louisa Fletcher knows all about this.

Now a successful entrepreneur, she was barely settling into her first job as an IT programmer when rejecting the advances of the boss saw her become the focus of a firestorm of intimidation and pressure. Undermined, humiliated and dressed down daily over matters that would have been ignored if they'd involved any other employee in the company, she endured months of ill treatment before finally cracking and handing in her notice.

"It was horrible, really ghastly, " she said. "I was absolutely miserable and didn't know what to do. There were no sexual harassment training workshops or courses in place.  Matters were only brought to a head when I was pushed up against a wall and assaulted. "You can't switch off and leave that kind of thing at the office. It's the sort of problem that follows you home and impacts on everything you do."

It sounds extreme, but according to new research from the Dignity at Work Partnership, 4.7 million British workers are currently suffering at the hands of office bullies in the absence of workplace harassment training classes or seminars. The survey, co-sponsored by the DTI, reveals that more than 50% of UK employees - equivalent to some 14.5 million people - have been bullied at some point in their working lives.

The report also found that cyberbullying is increasingly becoming a problem in the workplace, with a fifth of respondents claiming to have been bullied by email in their current or previous jobs, and 6.2% saying they have been bullied via a text message. The increased use of communications tools such as Blackberries is also making digital sexual harassment a problem outside working hours, according to 13% of respondents.
In addition, the study reveals that a quarter of UK employees have at some point been forced to cancel their long awaited annual leave following demands from their employers. 

"Bullying in the workplace can destroy peoples' lives, " says Mandy Telford, Dignity At Work co-coordinator for trade union Unite. "It also has a direct impact on an organisation's bottom line, and we hope that making the financial impact clear will help management and HR staff build a business case for tackling the issue and providing a harassment training course or class.

"Our project aims to tackle workplace bullying in partnership with employers by requiring they provide a harassment training workshop or seminar. We hope that showing the financial impact of bullying will encourage them to develop their own anti-bullying policies, benefiting both their staff and their bottom line."
THAT'S all well and good, but many victims of office intimidation feel that they are powerless to act, particularly if the aggressor holds a senior position in the corporate food chain.

Fletcher accepts this, but draws on her second experience of bullying to provide evidence of what can be done.

Having fallen foul of a fellow director at a property company, she found herself and several other employees the subject of a passive-aggressive campaign in which their antagonist seized every opportunity to unnecessarily criticize, single out and defame her chosen victims.

So, together with fellow staff, Fletcher began keeping a log in which they recorded the details of each incident. Simultaneously switching to a policy of only communicating with her aggressor in writing, she quickly assembled a welter of damning evidence and submitted it to the board. Reasoning that this must be a major factor behind the company's high staff turnover the board acted, and the bullying director was shown the door.

"No company wants people dreading coming into work every morning. If people are not happy they're not productive either, and this just isn't a winning commercial formula. My experience shows that if you make a stand, provide harassment training courses, and prove to senior management that there is a problem, they will almost certainly act to stop it."

Source: Iain S. Bruce Link