How to Stop Workplace Bullying

Workplace bullying has an enormous impact on other bullying on our society. To gain some power back, workplace-bullying victims search for weaker people in order to take that power from them. They search all around them for any person who appears weaker, even if that person is their partner, family member, friend or child.

If we want to stop bullying completely, we must have a holistic approach to it. We must help everyone involved in bullying, because bullying is a cycle that start with big bullies who feel inferior in some way and bully others to regain their sense of power, which makes their victims feel inferior in some way and bully others to regain their sense of power… can you see the cycle? Let’s stop it!

To stop bullying at work, we can help three entities: the victim, the bystanders (those who witness the bullying) and the organization who is suffering from it directly or indirectly by loss of working days, motivation and productivity. In the upcoming posts, I will write tips to each of these entities and what they can do to stop the workplace bullying. Find out who you are and use these tips to make a difference where you work.

Bullying it is everyone’s business and sometimes, a single tip can make all the difference. You can stop workplace bullying by stopping the bully, but also by changing the behavior of the bullying victim.

Read How to Stop Workplace Bullying »

How to Help Bullying Bystanders (2)

In the last bullying post, I wrote 25 tips to help bystanders who are involved in bullying. In the bullying game, there are the bully, the victim and the bystanders. Each of them is very important in eliminating the bullying phenomenon.

The bystanders are the people that watch a bully act and either get themselves involved or not in favor of the bully or the victim. As a reminder, here are the 5 types of bystanders:

* Ring Leaders
* Associates
* Reinforcers
* Outsiders
* Defenders

On average, when another person gets involved to defend a bullying victim, the bullying will stop within 10 seconds. Think about it: 10 seconds are enough for the bully to take a step back and for the situation to improve for everyone. Therefore, I am sure you understand how important it is for us to give power to the defenders (and inspire more of them), because they hold the key to making a big shift in bullying elimination.

Read How to Help Bullying Bystanders (2) »

How to Help Bullying Bystanders

Bullying involves additional “players” besides the bully and the victim. All the other players are called “bystanders” collectively and include the “ring leader”, the “associates”, the “reinforcers”, the “outsiders” and the “defenders”. Here are the characteristics of each of these types.

Ring Leader – These are kids in power who orchestrate a bullying act by using their social influence. They do not bully directly but use a bully’s weakness to harass other weak kids.

Associates – These are children who actively join the bully. It could be because they are afraid of the bully or the ring leader, but they do not initiate the bullying themselves. In some strange way, they are also victims.

Reinforcers – These kids do not bully directly but give a feedback to the bully by commenting, smiling or laughing. They do not initiate an act of bullying towards other kids, but they increase the bully’s confidence by being a supportive audience.

Outsiders – These children are on the victim’s side, but they keep quiet when they witness an act of bullying. They are afraid of the bully, so they say nothing and do nothing in order to avoid drawing any attention to themselves.

Defenders – These kids are rare. They intervene and actively try to stop the bully and comfort the victim.

As you can understand, the involvement of un-involvement of all these characters can make a huge difference to the frequency and intensity of the bullying in any environment. On average, kids who get involved and defend a bullied victim stop the bullying act within 10 seconds. We need more of them!

Read How to Help Bullying Bystanders »

How to Help Bullying Victims (4)

The bullying game cannot be played without the victim. For bullies to gain power, they must find a victim to take it away from. If we help the victims not to be easy targets, it will make it a bit harder for the bullies to take anything away from them.

Many of the tips described in list series are useful both for kids and for adults. Much like any other list, some are easier to implement and others are less so, but I promise you that if you go over each of them and dedicate time each week to implementing at least one, the bullying will decrease and may eventually stop.

Again, if you are a parent concerned about your child being a victim of bullying, some of the tips here are mainly for you. You can arrange for your kids to get to school in a safe way, order food for them so they do not take money to school and even talk to their teachers and ask them to get involved. Do not expect your kids to figure this out all by themselves. It is hard to be bullied and harder to think clearly and come up with mature solutions, so take charge!

Read How to Help Bullying Victims (4) »

How to Help Bullying Victims (3)

Bullying, as you may remember, is the 4th common reasons kids call helpline services. 13% of children aged 15-18 experience continual harassment and 14-48% of children say they have been cyber bullied.

85% of kids who have been bullied via their mobile phone know the bully and 87% of cyber bullies do it through text messaging (SMS), yet 58% of kids do not know how to report cyber bullying.

The results?

75% of victims have symptoms of post-traumatic stress and 65% of them still have those symptoms five years later. In the long term, bullied children are more likely to drop out of school, to use drugs and to use alcohol.

It is critical to our society that we stop this phenomenon.

Read How to Help Bullying Victims (3) »

How to Help Bullying Victims (2)

Last week, I wrote the first 25 tips to help victims bullying cope with and avoid being bullied. As I have written before, I believe in a holistic approach to stopping this phenomenon of bullying, which is a cycle of violence and abuse.

Building the victims’ confidence to function as a “bully repellent” is a good start. In some cases, this will stop them feeling so weak they have to bully someone else to restore their personal power.

Here are the next 25 tips to help the bully victim.

Read How to Help Bullying Victims (2) »

How to Help Bullying Victims

The bullying game is played by more than just the bully and the bullied victim. There are the bystanders, the home of the bully, the workplace, the schools and society in general. Each of them needs help in gaining power to make sure they do not try to steal it from someone weaker.

I believe that all players in the game need help. There is a dynamic that needs to be broken and each participant, whether directly or not, can break the bullying cycle. In the next chapters, I will write tips to help each of the players to break the bullying cycle. This post contains tips for the bullied victim.

Since I believe a holistic approach is best in creating social change, I will direct these tips at both kids and adults. Helping bullied kids and adults will make sure they do not continue the cycle by bullying others to gain some perceived power that was lost.

There are 100 tips on the list (25 in each post). Each of them separately can make a huge change in your life. Study them carefully and find those you think are easy enough for you to apply. If you are a parent and you want to help your bullied child or prevent your child from being bullied, find techniques that are easy enough to explain and to apply and focus on each of them separately. Most of the tips are about building your emotional and social intelligence, so anyone can use of them.

Read How to Help Bullying Victims »

Workplace Bullying (2)

If you look at the forms of workplace bullying listed in Bullying (10): Workplace Bullying, you know that almost everyone who works for others has been somehow bullied at work. The expectation to stay at work late has increased in the last 20 years so much that when you talk to people about getting home on time to be with their kids, they are 100% convinced that leaving work at 5pm (as they should do) will threaten their job, their career and their financial situation.

17 years ago, when we lived in California, all my women friends said their husbands returned home at 8pm, barely had a chance to kiss the kids goodnight and only spent weekends with the family. For everyone – the wives, the kids and the workers – that was part of life and they felt they had to accept it.

Read Workplace Bullying (2) »

Happy Holidays from Family Matters

Family Matters is taking some time off from researching, coaching and writing and heading off on a family vacation. After all, this is why we do what we do – to help ourselves have a better family time together.

It has been an awesome year for us. We were very proud and happy that our daughter Eden, our happy thought, joined us in writing this year. We have had many personal achievements at work, in our relationships and with our kids. The only wish we have for ourselves is that next year will be even better. Better is a good formula for a happy life.

We want to thank all of the 150,000 readers we have had this year and give special thanks to all those who have posted comments, shared their opinions and contributed to the community of parents and educators around this blog. Whatever your personal views, we love to read them and engage in a discussion on the important aspects of parenting with you.

Read Happy Holidays from Family Matters »

Workplace Bullying

When we talk about bullying, we mainly think of children and the perceived increase in acts of bullying at schools. However, as we discovered in Home of the Bully, it is very likely that the parents or older siblings who are raising child bullies have been bullied by their parents or are being bullied at work themselves. Therefore, they are merely trapped in a cycle of bullying.

In Australia, it is estimated that 1 of 6 people are bullied at work. A research done by Duncan and Riley on the staff of a school cluster found that 97% of staff thought they had been or were still being bullied by another person at work.

In 2002, it was estimated that workplace bullying cost the Australian economy 36 billion dollars a year, not including stress leave people took due to bullying.

But the implications of this phenomenon are far more devastating than the financial toll society pays for bullying. People who are bullied and made to feel weak at work have a higher chance of finding someone weaker to pick on to regain their power. If they have kids, those kids might become their victims at home.

Besides the “obvious” workplace bullies – employers and managers (“the boss”) – anyone may act like a bully: subordinates, colleagues, clients, suppliers, individually or in groups. Anyone who feels weak may use bullying to regain their power by putting another down.

Read Workplace Bullying »

How to Stop Workplace Bullying

How to Help Bullying Victims (2)

How to Help Bullying Victims

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