The scale of workplace bullying is finally coming to light, says Anne Wiltsher
Nineteen-year-old Julie Stowe (not her real name) started her first job as a nursery nurse in a private nursery last summer. 'I was extremely impressed by the way I was made welcome and felt that I had developed a good working relationship within the team,' she says. However, after a month that relationship began to deteriorate.
'The atmosphere became very competitive and strained,' recalls Julie, who says she was often singled out for criticism by the two managers and four other team members who made 'snide comments' behind her back. 'I'm open to constructive criticism, but I felt I was being watched all the time when I was doing activities with the children,' she says.
After five months of negative remarks, often in front of the children, Julie lost her confidence. 'I felt isolated and my self-esteem dropped as I felt I had no-one to discuss my problems with,' she says. Luckily, she was able to find a job in another nursery in which she is now happily working.
Looking back, Julie says she could have understood her former team's hostility if she had behaved in 'an unsociable or unprofessional manner', but she does not believe that she did so. She slightly regrets not taking up the issue with her manager, but she did not feel confident enough - and in any case, she says, her manager was part of the team that was undermining her.
Almost half of Britain's employees (47 per cent) have witnessed bullying at work in the past five years, one in four (24.4 per cent) said they had been bullied themselves during that time and one in ten (10.5 per cent) had been bullied in the past six months, according to the biggest British study of workplace bullying carried out to date which was published last month.
The survey, conducted by the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) and supported by the TUC and the CBI, was funded by the British Occupational Health Research Foundation (BOHRF). The survey was sent to 5,300 employees from 70 organisations in the public, private and voluntary sectors and the response rate was 43 per cent.
The survey found that teaching was one of the sectors where bullying was most prevalent (15.5 per cent of respondents), along with the prison service (16 per cent), post and telecommunications (16 per cent) and the performing arts (14 per cent). There are no figures for the early years sector.
The personal effects of being bullied can be pernicious - anxiety, depression, ill health, divorce, even suicide. A staggering 18 million working days are estimated to be lost every year because of it.
The UMIST survey found that most people are bullied by managers (three out of four cases) - but not all. Just over a third were bullied by their own colleagues. A third were single victims, but most (54 per cent) were bullied together with some of their colleagues, and in 14.8 per cent of cases, everyone in the group was bullied. Bullying also went on a long time - 39 per cent said it continued for more than two years.
Helge Hoel, the prime researcher for the UMIST survey, explains the definition of bullying it used: 'A situation where one or several individuals persistently, over a period of time, perceive themselves to be at the receiving end of negative actions from one or several persons, in a situation where the target of the bullying has difficulty in defending himself or herself against these actions.'
'We did not refer to a one-off incident as bullying,' he says. Interestingly, if a person did not perceive himself to be bullied, the survey did not count him as being so, even though others might disagree, so the number of cases may be underestimated.
Aileen Hay, a director of the Andrea Adams Trust, which receives more than 100 calls per week from people on the subject, says that they have received a few calls from nursery staff but that the number is small in comparison to, say, teachers.
'Most early years staff who call are from small private nurseries where the person doing the bullying is the boss,' she says. 'One of the knock-on effects is that the children can pick up the lack of respect for the nursery nurse and it may be difficult for her to keep discipline.
'Nursery staff can also be bullied by parents,' she says. 'This can be difficult if there's pressure not to lose business. The inability to deal with parents can be seen as a weakness by the manager, so the nursery nurse feels she's fighting a battle on two fronts - aggressive parents on one hand and a critical manager on the other.'
The Professional Association of Nursery Nurses (PANN) has also received an increase in calls about bullying. Professional officer Alison Johnston says, 'Members may not describe it as bullying but that's what it is. It could be the way they are spoken to, how they are given directions. They may be humiliated in public or undermined. They may not be involved in decisions that concern them.'
The reason for the increase in complaints, she believes, is two-fold. 'People are more aware of how they expect to be treated at work, and second, there is increased external pressure on nursery managers which is affecting how they manage.'
Bad management style is linked to bullying in the UMIST survey and is exemplified in letters to Nursery World. One states, 'I previously worked for one year in a nursery where two colleagues bullied (and still do) the girls who worked with them by not talking to them and making them do the cleaning and so on.
'I spoke to the manager and head-manager but was not believed, so I left. I have now found out that some of the girls before me left for the same reason and the new ones coming in aren't being believed either, so there is a high turnover.'
It may seem that people in low-paid, low- status jobs would be more likely to be bullied, but there is no evidence to support this. 'We've had people in the top professions contact us,' says Aileen Hay. 'In our experience, the reasons for bullying are personal envy - something about the victim which makes the bully feel insecure or someone being seen as 'different' to the others in the group - and also pressure on managers.'
The UMIST survey found that bullying affects employees almost equally at all levels of seniority. Younger employees are only slightly more likely to be bullied than older ones; women only slightly more likely than men. Almost anyone can be bullied, it seems, given the right circumstances.
'It's often thought that if you're bullied you must be some kind of weak victim that's allowed it to happen to you, but our callers are very strong people,' says Aileen Hay.
