Teri Daniel is the author of the SHRM-published Stop Bullying At Work: Strategies and Tools for HR and Legal Professionals.

Gary Namie is co-author of The Bully-Free Workplace.

Series details and registration can be found here. Earn 3 HRCI units.

YONKERS – The Yonkers City Council Tuesday night approved a resolution to require that the topic of workplace bullying be integrated into the ethics training for city employees.

The zero tolerance policy on such behavior was proposed by Councilman Michael Sabatino.

“Everyone is affected by bullying; the person subjected to bullying, those who witness it as well as the person who bullies,” Sabatino said. “It created a toxic and hostile work environment.”

He said in most instances, people spend more time with your co-workers than with their families and friends. “Everyone should feel comfortable and safe in their work environment, so what better place to start than our city offices.”

The city council requested that the Human Rights Commission work with the Human Resources Department to create appropriate training materials to assist city workers.

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Zero tolerance when first introducing prohibitions is a flawed idea. However, we applaud the City Council for taking a stand.

Imagine how this perception appears to your workers. Sexual abuse, protected status-based harassment and outright violence are prohibited by law. Everyone knows what kinds of behavior are illegal and, ostensibly, avoids them. As awareness of workplace bullying increases, along with an unfortunate rise in reports of workplace abuse, more and more employees realize they’ve either seen examples of abusive behavior at work or experienced it directly. Those employees ask themselves if they’re protected, in case something like that happens to them. They’re going to find only one of two options: that their employer has a policy to protect them against abuse, regardless of demographic, or there is no broad-based protection.

Excuses for a lack of policy abound, but none seem to make sense. Taking a stand against abusive behavior at work is not only good for an organization’s bottom line, but sends a clear message of support to all employees. Rather than watching from the sidelines as destructive individuals (sometimes just a single person) demoralize others, erode productivity and open the organization up to legal liability, why not proactively address such behavior and declare it a violation of company policy? Creating effective, targeted and enforceable organizational policy takes but a few days.

We can help. Taking action now, instead of when problems crop up (or worse yet, boil over) creates goodwill among staff, and marks you and your business as one that cares for its people.

The truth is that employees, especially targets of the bullying, know it all too well. Recognition is one of their problems, but not the main one. They wonder why management doesn’t stop it. And for that we have the video Primer for Managers. The real benefit of “employee awareness raising” is that bullied workers are validated.

We validate these injured workers by demonstrating that they are not alone (the prevalence of bullying is epidemic) and that they did not invite their misery. We also connect the dots for targets to understand how bullying causes them surprising health problems. Finally, validation tells targets that they are not “crazy.” The personality of targets is such that they tend to blame themselves first. Over time, with the combined effects of stress-related health harm and the emotional impact of debilitating anxiety and clinical depression, it’s easy for them to feel destabilized emotionally. Targets deserve to be told that they are injured by the process. Injuries do not equal craziness.

Of course, coworkers blind to the effects of bullying on targeted individuals learn a great deal more than they knew before about the impact on the targets’ health.

So, please continue to provide awareness raising, but please know that it accomplishes much more than what you expected. For doing anything, you rank among the few employers who care enough to act.

The starting point for any initiative is executive commitment to declaring bullying’s unacceptability. That opens the door to creating a policy. Too often, the work stops there. Policy and correction procedures are necessary but hardly sufficient.

For sustainability, there should be a cadre of individuals representing the organization’s different levels and disciplines that makes anti-bullying priority #1. We train such teams of internal experts as part of our Blueprint program.

Without many people able to carry on the initiative through education, incident intervention, and peer validation and support, the initiative propped up by only a policy will fail in a short while. Sustainability requires committed people. That’s the key. Is your organization ready? Call us for guidance – 360-656-6603.

The findings reveal that inadvertent, implicit rewards for perpetrators coupled with the absence of punishment accounted for 44% of the explanation for the presence of bullying. Overall, the work environment factors accounted for 56% of explanations.

The bully’s personality, which is often described as the only reason for bullying, was credited with only 10% of the responsibility.

The lesson to take from the findings is that much of bullying is in an employer’s control, if there is a willingness to confront and reverse it. There is hope for change. Here at the Work Doctor, our entire approach is based on the work environment as causal. Changing the culture through a re-engineering of the rewards and consequences surrounding bullying is much more successful than attempting to change an aggressor’s personality.

Control what you can and you can stop workplace bullying. We can teach you how. Call us — 360.656.6603.

Download a copy of the results of this new study.

Denial that bullying happens has stopped since we started the U.S. movement 15 years ago. Bullying was reported by 51% of respondents who were aware of incidents. It is most prevalent in large organizations (>500 employees) at 71%; reported by 42% of respondents in firms with 100-199 employees; and the lowest in small organizations (1 to 99 employees) at 38%.

A remarkable 34% of respondents answered that bullying has decreased in frequency over the last two years. Only 18% believe it has increased. Most (48%) believe it has remained constant.

Three (3) percent of organizations claim to have a separate workplace bullying policy. Others (40%) say workplace bullying is combined with another workplace policy. Remarkably, nearly half (44%) said their organization has no policy and has no plans to put one in place.

Prevention and/or awareness training is provided in 28% of organizations according to the SHRM 2012 survey. It looks like HR staff receive the majority of training (35%), with managers coming in second at 34%.

SHRM asked a question about how organizations respond to alleged perpetrators of bullying. The most frequent response chosen (76%) was “depends on specific circumstances.” This means that HR prefers to deal with bullying on a “case-by-case” basis. Unfortunately, this serves the organization poorly because there is rarely consistency, fairness, or justice when favoritism plays a role.

SHRM members say most bullying is between coworkers or peers (82%) with 56% being top-down with supervisors as perpetrators. This finding contradicts the large national surveys in the U.S. Whereas according to the WBI U.S. survey, 72% of perpetrators are bosses, 18% are coworkers.

Finally, a quarter (27%) of HR survey respondents said they were bullied themselves.

You can download a copy of the SHRM slide show depicting results of the survey conducted in May 2011.

In adulthood, the same stereotype depicting targets as weak persists. In fact, employees targeted for repeated, harmful, abusive mistreatment possess many strengths. Targets are known to be technically more skilled than their bully; be better liked; be ethical, honest and principled; and to reject workplace politics. Those personal strengths threaten the seemingly invincible bully. The reality is that bullying behavior masks an afraid-to-be-exposed person.

So, when a supervisor new to a work team, division or region complains immediately about a worker whose record has been exemplary, or at the least, never problematic, pause. Ask the supervisor to be specific. If the complaints are personal attacks and unrelated to actual work performance, the problem is most likely the new supervisor. Would that supervisor benefit from management training? If she or he never received any, training might be beneficial.

Whatever you do, do not allow the new supervisor to impose a performance improvement plan (PIP) on the veteran employee until the supervisor has been immersed in the work for at least a year. Then, and only then, can the supervisor's perspective be considered credible.

The root cause of most initial friction is the failure to exchange honest expectations between managers and team members. The longer the team has been intact, the clearer their norms are. When a new manager comes on the scene full of expectations about how work needs to get done but does not explicitly express them, everyone is left guessing. And most will guess wrong. Clarity comes from open expression of "how we did things here before you came" coupled with "how I want to see things done." Then at such an open meeting, let the negotiations begin. With no side dominating the other, agreement can be reached and interpersonal flare-ups avoided.

If this isn't done, the manager will be wrongly perceived as a bully wishing to dominate the team. The manager will wrongly believe the team is intransigent, locked into resisting her or his instructions. Both sides misunderstand and misrepresent because they have not had the open discussion during the earliest phase of the transition to new management. Problems are preventable with a small investment in people skills.

Two missed Red Flag warnings that told the employer there was a problem:

Missed Opportunity 1. Bullied workers try to tell executives but were not believed. This happens for two reasons.

a. Often the descriptions of misconduct appear too outrageous to be real when, in fact, perpetrators do commit atrocious acts against subordinates. Of course, they do not show their sadistic side to their own bosses. They are excellent impression managers.

b. Bullies prepare executive sponsors to not believe future complaints lodged against them. This serves a pre-emptive function. That way, when the bullied person eventually does complain, she or he is not believed!

Missed Opportunity 2. Bullying cases are mislabeled as mere "personality clashes," which makes them seem solvable by the two people involved. This is wrong because the perpetrator is not motivated to resolve the problem they initiated and benefit from. The target is powerless to stop the bully.

Bullying requires high-level employer intervention. To push accountability down to the lowest level is the missed opportunity to resolve it and prevent future occurrences.

Here is our continuum of negative behavior that arranges mistreatment from mild to extreme. It appears in our book, The Bully-Free Workplace.

A stronger class of negative conduct is Disrespect. It is personalized, there is a target. It is the beginning of contemptuous interactions in which one person believes the other is a lesser human being than she or he.

Bullying is everything including incivility and disrespect up to, but stopping short of, physical violence. One popular synonym for bullying is psychological violence. Bullying is harmful to the targeted person's health. Health harm is based on the person's stress response in reaction to stressors, especially cruel people with whom that person works.

As tactics escalate, a line is crossed rendering the mistreatment abusive. In fact, bullying is akin to domestic violence where the abuser is on the payroll. Bullying is NOT simply eye-rolling or inappropriate jokes. Those would fall lower on the scale. We reserve the term workplace bullying for repeated, harmful, abusive mistreatment -- a form of workplace violence.