How Bullying Impacts Workplace Safety

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Dr Gary Namie, a social psychologist widely regarded as North America’s foremost authority on workplace bullying. Along with his wife, he’s the founder of the Workplace Bullying Institute, and they’ve also co-authored multiple books and academic articles addressing this issue.

Gary begins this powerful interview with a very impactful definition of workplace bullying. He explains why this “disgraceful and embarrassing human condition” exists and, perhaps more alarmingly, describes how institutions actually allow it to perpetuate.

Dr Namie feels very strongly that HR has failed to address bullying, so issues a rallying call to safety professionals to use their hazard identification expertise to end the prevalence of workplace bullying.

He’s encouraged by OHS professionals’ adoption of psychosocial safety management and believes that post #metoo media attention on toxic workplace environments will help raise the profile of bullying prevention.

Gary passionately discusses both the individual and organizational negative consequences of workplace bullying and gives safety professionals practical guidance on how they can help solve this issue. Despite sharing some optimism about the future, he leaves us with no doubt about the severity of this problem.

♪ [music] ♪ - [Mary] My name is Mary Conquest. I'm your host for "Safety Labs by Slice," the podcast where we explore the human side of safety to support safety professionals. We move past regulations and reportables to talk about the core skills of safety leadership, empathy, influence, trust, rapport, in other words, the soft skills that help you do the hard stuff.

♪ [music] ♪ Hi, there. Welcome to "Safety Labs by Slice." I've had a few conversations with guests on this podcast about the importance of recognizing psychosocial hazards in the workplace.

My guest today specializes in a specific type of psychosocial hazard, bullying. For years, this term was associated in popular culture, almost exclusively with the schoolyard. But as many of us unfortunately know, it doesn't magically disappear after childhood, bullying shows up in the workplace in many different ways. Today, we'll discuss its implications for workplace safety.

Gary Namie is a social psychologist, widely regarded as North America's foremost authority on workplace bullying. He has extensive experience teaching in graduate management and psychology departments. Since 1997, he's directed the Workplace Bullying Institute, the organization he and Dr. Ruth Namie founded in response to her mistreatment by an abusive supervisor.

Together, they authored the books, "The Bully-Free Workplace" and "The Bully at Work," and have contributed to academic research in the field. The Workplace Bullying Institute has commissioned 5 national scientific surveys since 2007 and directs a national campaign to enact state-level workplace anti-bullying legislation, which has been introduced in 31 states to date.

Dr. Namie is credited with originating workplace bullying consulting in the U.S., and counts government agencies, corporations, nonprofit organizations, and unions as clients. He also serves as an expert witness in state and federal courts. And he assures me that because of that, he is in no way intimidated by this interview. Gary joins us from Clarkston, Washington.

Welcome.

- [Dr. Namie] Welcome. Thank you, Mary.

- So, let's start out by defining workplace bullying. Some people are habitually grumpy, pessimistic, or unpleasant, but at what point does behavior rise to the point of bullying?

- The line that's crossed is health harm, actually. So, it's not about grumpiness or a subjective state. It's actually a systematic campaign of interpersonal destruction by one or more people against another. Our definition at the Workplace Bullying Institute has been for years that it's repeated harmful mistreatment by one or more people...one or more employees because this is in the workplace, as you said, not the schoolyard.

It is abuse of conduct that takes the form of either one or more of the following, verbal abuse, behavior that's threatening, intimidating, or humiliating, or work sabotage and/or work sabotage interference, actually preventing work from getting done. So essentially, it is chronic by nature and it's not a single-shot event. So, it's very habitual, perpetual, and it's unremitting for...the individual who's the recipient, we call the bullied target.

And the perpetrator is the original instigator. But in its original form, it was called mobbing by the international pioneer, Heinz Leymann, always many against one, multiple perpetrators. And, in fact, bullying, though, I guess its initial origin is almost always a one-on-one, there's a single individual that decides the cruelty must be launched.

But then very quickly, the co-workers jump on board. And then when the person does recognize what's happening to them, the organization then sides against them rather quickly with multiple departments, multiple people. So, it really becomes a mobbing situation, many against one.

But we use the English term, workplace bullying, and have been doing it, and that's what the researchers primarily use around the world.

- Speaking of research, talk to me a little bit about...I'm curious about this sort of, one person makes this decision to be cruel in some fashion, and other people jump in. So, these other people maybe would not have thought of doing this on their own. But is there a neuroscience, or is there...what's the thinking about how or why that happens?

- Well, okay, you're talking to a social psychologist. And it is to me disgraceful and embarrassing the human condition how easily swayed we are, how easily cowed into fear we are when we see aggression against another person, how we...oh, gosh, we're so fearful it's going to happen to us.

That we're going to jump on board and participate with the perpetrator. Now, the perpetrator may order us to do that, so we may do it by command. In fact, I have a survey in 2008 we did online, not scientific, but of bullied targets at the WBI website. And I broke it down and you would, of course, ask me about something, I can't remember the exact statistics on.

But a full 60%-plus of the witnesses, the co-workers cited against the bully targets. And they often excused their misconduct, I call them misconduct, their antisocial behavior by blaming it on the boss telling them to do it and they were just following orders.

Now, this comes on the heels of a major rekindling of the Holocaust story on our public television. It's been very hard to watch. But in the early days, I would go around when I was doing a lot of public speaking about bullying, and we equated it with the Holocaust. So, now I'll tell you this story, we happened to be on a cruise and there was a woman veteran of the Holocaust, and she was on the cruise.

And she offered to air the documentary featuring her showcasing her experience. I think she, as a child, got out of Auschwitz and climbed to the border and made it to Denmark or something. I mean, it just...on the ground she and one other child. Anyway, all of five people showed up for the documentary.

And there I was, and I can't get enough of the story because I think it's guilt for the human condition why we stood by. You know, the Holocaust is half the Nazis and half Oligo-Germans who were totally aware of and failed to stop it.

And, of course, the other Jews who were pressed into service against Jews. They did so at the end of a gun, but the infamous good Germans are right. How could they do that? And so here was a real veteran of the Holocaust. And I said, "Ma'am, I have to tell you the nature of my work, and do I have your permission to use Holocaust, or have I gone too far?"

She says, "No, I go into school and talk about school bullying." And she says, "It is a holocaust situation." So, I always felt vindicated by that, I felt justified. But more recently than the Holocaust is the research on the bystander effect. And it just shows our cowardice. And that was prompted by a 1964 murder in Queen's, New York, famous Kitty Genovese murder, where allegedly these eyewitnesses did nothing.

Turns out that's part urban legend. They were ear witnesses. No one saw it. No one saw it. That was myth. I know it's horrible. Her brother made a documentary in 2016 and revealed some truths.

But still, the people in the apartment building who heard the screeching dying cry of that young woman did nothing. Only the security person did. And so we have a lot to atone for as co-workers in our abdication of responsibility. You mentioned neuroscience.

Here's a tie-in. There's a researcher at the USC, University of Southern California where I actually once taught neuroscience lab, who studied compassion. Compared compassion, the firing pattern of brain response to compassion versus adulation.

And she said she discovered that compassion was both multifaceted, multiple areas, multiple association areas activated, but also latent. So it's very slow. It's a very slow emotion to feel. And she argued, I think, compellingly in her discussion section in the article, maybe that's why we allow ourselves to avert compassion because it takes so long to be triggered.

We know that it's potentially painful because empathy is painful, it's engaging. And if we can avert the gaze, if we can not hear what we are really hearing and redefine it and all that, then maybe we can avoid having to engage in compassion because it's so costly.

Strange, huh? So to me it all fits in with co-worker indifference. There are just so many explanations for it, but in the end, some people are just raised to go help others and they just they don't avoid the call, they run right into the fire and go help co-workers. But they're very rare.

- That's an interesting point about compassion because fear is so primal, the opposite, right? The fear is sort of the root of this abdication of responsibility. It happens really quickly. Fear happens fast.

- it's right in the amygdala, and it's not confusing. And some people are more fearful than others because now we say the genetic...in my university course, I call it workplace bullying university. I'm not in university anymore. I'm a recovering academic, but I still named our curriculum, workplace bullying university.

And I just found this thing about SLC6A4 gene on the 17th human chromosome. And if it creates the short version of the allele, the phenotype of that particular gene, that amygdala is going to be...that person will be prone to be much more fearful and also to have perpetual negative affect.

So basically, they're kind of a scaredy-cat and they have a miserable existence. And so that just explains why some people are more likely to be fearful.

- Well, that goes into my next question was, is it human nature? That's not a single yes or no definitive answer, but I think those are some areas we can look at. And, of course, the way someone is raised.

- I think we're so prone to... The research on social influence in the '70s and the '80s was also somewhat embarrassing. Well, no, it started in the '40s with the conformity research showing how gullible we are, right? And then along TV in the '60s comes candid camera showing once again how gullible we are and susceptible to social influence.

Basically, that was social psychology on television. But the researchers were showing how absolutely vulnerable we were or dependent upon others to define our social reality. They would fill rooms full of smoke and have a bunch of Confederate participants sit there non-reactive by design, by instruction.

And when the poor real subject, we used to call 'em subjects, the human participant, the study person, studied one, looks up, naturally, their own gut says, the room's filling with smoke, emergency. Oh my gosh, no one's reacting. And then they just immediately use the others to define their reality. So now we use the phrase gaslighting where others are trying to define our reality in a malevolent way, but in social influence research was gaslighting long before they called it gaslight.

I hadn't even thought of this before. I just said that. I'll be darn. That's exactly what it is where we are dependent upon others to define our own experience, but we willingly give that over, that defining power to others. And so now with your original question, if we couple that with fear, we have no trouble going there.

We're not going to react in a socially responsible way to a bully target when it's going to get us in trouble that we think interesting and wow. I love that. I love that new connection. I could write that.

- You heard it here first, people.

- I did. I said it here first. I can't believe that. Go ahead.

- Lest that leave you too hopeless listeners. I would say too that our social reality is probably part of our survival instinct as a species. But I actually don't want to go too far down that route because I have a lot more specific questions to ask you about workplace bullying. So, first of all, what are some typical responses to bullying?

First from the perspective of the person who has been targeted by the bullying?

- Well, first I have to say it takes a long time before they recognize what's happening to them. Because aggression has become such an accepted and normative part of work life, it's hard to recognize variance from it that this is really something wrong that's being done to them. Okay.

When they do stumble upon the term, recognize it, look, family and friends have seen that this is abnormal for a long time. When they go to a physician for an unrelated reason and their blood pressure has shot up, that physician's going to tell them to quit. Just quit. First, what's the major stressor, the source of stress in your life? Well, things aren't going really well at work.

Tell me about it, dah dah dah dah dah dah. Oh my gosh, so then you got to get out of there. That job's going to kill you. And the physician's always add just, well, just quit, as if it were that easy. Maybe from the outside is where they first get the notion that something odd has been happening to them. What they never connect in the beginning, unfortunately, Mary, is the visceral somatic responses they should be feeling.

They're feeling them. You don't feel high blood pressure because that is already started and it's asymptomatic. But there are a lot of gastrointestinal things and other cardiovascular symptoms, sleep disruption, the fatigue, and all kinds of other things that are happening, but they don't connect them to their experience at work.

That's the problem. So months, months to recognize, one, that something is directly being done to them that is not being done to everyone else. And two, to connect the dots between their reaction to that. And you might think alarm spring into action, rebel, fight back. And that's not the first response.

First response is to blame themselves. Well, by definition, Stally Anderson says, what defines a target, or one of the overriding characteristics, dominant characteristics of a target is the person is unable to defend themselves at the time of the initial attacks and the assaults. As the bully is testing the water, testing that person's boundaries to see if they can repel them or not, they can't.

And as the bully sinks their claws in deeper because this is obviously an exploitable targeted person that they can do with what they want, the target begins self-blame. Two overriding emotion, shame and guilt. Shame is going to be the longer-term problem here, a sense of worthlessness, which, of course, is one of the goals of all abusive people.

You see, this is a form of abuse. This is the only form of abuse that's not yet been taboo, societally considered taboo and unacceptable. So, it's still very acceptable and approved, socially approved. So, therefore, the person who feels bad about it, feels bad about themselves, they feel guilt too.

Well, anyway, shame is the sense of worthlessness and, of course, right to your core concept of your identity and feeling that you're no good. And that will happen over time with unremitting exposure. But the other emotion they feel pretty early on is once they recognize it is guilt for having let it happen as if they were in control of it.

But bullying is an interpersonal phenomenon in which one person is trying to assert their dominion, their domination over another person. And it's all about control, interpersonal control, right? Unilateral control. Unidirectional control. And so guilt is really misplaced because if you could've, you would've.

You would not have been among the 30% of the people who have experienced bullying directly in the workplace. The vast majority would've had a way to counter it, ignore it, repel it, or actually, do a counter-assault against the person who comes at him. But the tenderhearted souls who cannot defend themselves at that time beat themselves up with guilt over not having thought of the appropriate verbal response, but they don't have that kind of repartee.

That's not in their experience. They're much too nice. And nice is not a positive trade in this case because it leads to the exploitation. So, unfortunately, initially, they have self-blame. Until then they discover through the prompting of others, mostly family and friends who are their only initial supporters and long-term supporters.

Of course, family and friends will abandon them if this goes on for too long, unfortunately. But they usually hang in there. But as we said about the co-workers, they're not there for them. So, they've lost their major source of social support. So, it's really easy to fall into the trap of self-blame.

- So then what are some, and I'm sure there's not just one, but what are some typical institutional responses?

- I don't want to bum your audience out, but I'm here to tell you the truth. It's not a happy story. If you thought co-workers were bad, the institutional responses are horrific and they magnify the problem for the person. It's the second wave, basically, of bullying.

First is the initial mistreatment, the pattern, the ongoing strategies and ways they're getting tripped up and lied about and made to believe that they're somehow faulty human beings. Second is the institutional responses. I like the...and I use it in court too.

Jennifer Freyd's originally out of University of Oregon, she sued him for sexual harassment and won her money. She has started what's called the Center for Institutional Courage. And what she's talking about is the adverse of exactly what organizations do do. And she came up with a really clever acronym for the response of both the bullies and the institutions.

DARVO, D-A-R-V-O, deny, attack. And then the RVO is to flip the whole script to reverse the victim and offender roles. Make the target, the offender, the aggressor, and then the poor bully, the victim. And that's how...I mean, DARVO is what exactly happens in the high-profile MeToo cases, for instance, with the Harvey Weinsteins and the rest, where the organizations feel they have to defend their high-profile abuser.

And the beauty of the MeToo Movement was it brought to the surface, to the public, they pulled the veil back. It's not just a corporate veil because this happens in government, it happens in every organization, large and small, where people who are the institutional...in their institutional roles should be the ones to handle complaints, to respond, to be responsive.

They turn their institutions into being not only nonresponsive but anti-complainant. They just bury the complainant. And, okay, I got to name names. People think this is an HR problem, human resources, I should go to human resources. This has to do with managerial behavior and all of that.

And 65% of the time the bully does outrank the target. And yes, often high-level or mid-level managers are involved. It would probably surprise people to know from our latest national study that about 40% of bully targets are management. So, they're just getting sandwiched between underlings and higher managers. But long story short, if we think of it in a stereotypical, prototypical way, top-down manager to non-supervisory worker kind of thing, management is supported by HR.

And HR doesn't ever have authority to go to...I mean, they're middling authority agency in all organizations. They lack the power to go and confront a senior VP, a higher-level official over their misconduct. They can't do anything about it.

So, that tells us bullying is a leadership problem. All right. So, HR fails in the following ways. There's a posity of policies. There's no law...and that partly that's, I don't want to say my fault, but our failure over many, many years has been to enact our legislative program, our legislative bill, and turn it into full law.

Only Puerto Rico passed our bill. It's called the Healthy Workplace Bill. It's very modest. But the business lobby has its sway over lawmakers. And we have not been able to yet get it enacted in any of the 50 states, though it's been introduced in a whole bunch. The point is in the absence of a law, nothing compels HR to then tell the executives we need a new policy to address this specific type of harassment.

One of the synonyms for bullying is status-blind harassment. The public thinks that everyone is protected against a hostile work environment. Oh, no, no, no, dear friends. The hostile work environment is claim eligible to only members of protected status groups. So, you better be one...and in Canada, the grounds-based harassment.

The non-discrimination laws are restricted for use by members of protected groups only. You've got to understand that, do your homework. And the problem that confuses the law, and mainly confuses HR, is when it's same gender, same race bullying.

Because then they say, "Well, but you're both protected. Gosh, we don't know what to do." So that they throw up their hands and say, "We don't know what to do." We don't think you can use our non-discrimination policies, which are designed to be in compliance with laws. They have to comply with laws. So, in the absence of a law for bullying, nothing compels an organization to be responsive in a fair, consistent way with bullying.

Now we go up the ladder, in 2013...how much does the C-suite know about bullying? And I would have no way of knowing that, except that in 2013, Zogby, our pollsters, actually let me submit two questions to their CEO survey. And the most important one...well, one, 68% of the C-suite dweller said, workplace bullying, the actual term workplace bullying, not harmful mistreatment, workplace bullying, 68% said "a serious problem."

But more importantly to me, the second question I got to ask is, so what are you doing about it in your organizations? And only 5% of the CEO said that they had personal contact with a bullying situation. There's the answer, 95% of the time the gatekeepers have been pushing the bullying complaints down the ladder so as if to protect the precious ears of the C-suite dwellers, the executives, the administrators.

So in the absence of leadership knowing about it, it's never going to get fixed because only leadership can fix it. Only leadership can tell senior managers stop it, or your jobs are on the line. They are the only ones that can threaten them.

HR can't threaten them. So, unfortunately, the HR legal partnered response to bullying complaints is pretty feckless and ineffective.

- So, let's talk then about safety managers, the safety profession, and how that fits into this larger picture.

- God, I wish they did. Oh, you make me want to... Okay, let me say this. Though I beat up HR in legal and the C-suite, there are other entities within large organizations that should be very sympathetic to bullying and offer some help. And one would be, even though they're external of the organization, most firms have an employee assistance program.

So, they should get on board because they're mental health counselors, they're probably getting some referrals, self-referrals from people who need help because of the emotional injuries suffered at the hands of perpetrators from bullying. Unfortunately, EAP programs allow management referrals too.

So, bullies misuse EAP by clubbing their targets over the head saying, "You're crazy." Part of the gaslighting again. "And I'm going to mandate that you go for counseling." And you know what they get when it's management referral, they get more data, they get more information about the person's situation because EAP then becomes a management support function, just like HR.

So, they get compromised with that feature in their contract. Self-referrals are okay. The data remain confidential in all of that. The second group that I think really should be instrumental are the risk managers. But the third group is the group you're talking about. I never see safety...the OHS people being brought into many corporate decisions.

Now, you know about this better than I, but to me they are an untapped resource. Because we've been at this 25 years, but in the last 5 years...no, the last 10 years, I've said it's a health hazard, a preventable health hazard, bullying.

Because mostly it is. And when you hear about the health harm, it's dramatic and moving and it should compel people to action. It should be the impetus for action. But since I've stumbled upon...I've always used Edmondson's psychological safety work. It was showcased in "The New York Times" years ago with the Google research in which they explored which of their teams were productive or not, efficacious or not, innovative or not.

And the underlying predictive factor was presence or absence of psychological safety to be able to speak up to dissent, the freedom to dissent and the freedom from fear, ridicule, humiliation. So basically, freedom from bullying. And so I liked psychological safety, but when I discovered psychosocial safety climate from our people down under, I have just absolutely fallen in love with that because if you speak the language of OHS and psychosocial safety, where traditional work conditions and work demands, task demands and the rest, they've added social relationships as a broad category, well, now you've added bullying, now you've added toxicity, negativity, dysfunctionality.

Oh my gosh, there's the answer. And OHS practitioners who know that need to have a voice. I mean, if I had more free time, I'd be writing only about that. I want them to be recognized as the internal authority, not HR, not legal.

But sometimes organizations dance around the topic of well-being and then they fall into the wellness trap and they offer gym memberships. No, no, no, no. We're not talking about that. We're talking about preventable harm inflicted in the workplace in the name of accomplishing the mission of the organization, whatever it is, private sector or government or nonprofit.

And it happens everywhere. Bullying happens everywhere. It happens in child abuse agencies. It happens in domestic violence shelters among domestic violence shelter staff. So, no place is immune. There's no limit to its range, okay? And OHS, to me, I think they're the only ones that are speaking this language that why are you imperiling the safety of a worker for what?

An exchange for just a simple paycheck. So, yes, I think they're an untapped resource. Let's pursue this further. You go ahead. Because I think it's a big deal, a big deal.

- Yeah. It sounds like even just the language of speaking about it as not just this person has been bullied, but this person has experienced a psychological injury, like the term injury, then there is legislation you can tap into. I believe, now I'm not an expert on that.

- Well, you're in Canada. Right, Mary?

- I am.

- Not in the U.S.?

- No.

- Not yet. Yeah.

- Not yet.

- Not here.

- Oh, I see. The legislative. I thought you meant I wasn't in the U.S. yet.

- Oh, no, no, no, no. I'm just saying, I mean, you know, Canadian regulations, they're more sensitive and responsive, not American health regulation.

- So, from what you've seen from how the safety profession currently does deal with it, you feel that it's an untapped resource. Why do you think it's untapped? Do you think that safety professionals aren't recognizing it, or there's just been this assumption that it's an HR or a C-suite issue?

Or how do they get...

- I wish it were C-suite issue, but no, the latter. That it's HR. It's an assumption it's about employee relations, or the lack thereof, but it's not. It's not. And HR basically, they satisfy compliance requirements for the organization, checkboxes. Do we have health insurance?

Do we have insurance, period? Do we have any plans written up? Do we have job expectations? Have we written job descriptions? Do we have contractual things going on? And that's really all they do, to make sure they can try and keep the organization out of court.

They don't do so well in the court cases I'm involved with because HR is always complicit in bad things. I don't know where...okay, so let me back up. So, HR is always lobbying to be part of the C-suite. They want to be on the executive team.

They want to be with the big people. They want to sit at the adult table and not the kitty table. I would put them in the basement and throw the padlock on because they're a factless, useless entity for anything. And when HR claims to be employee advocates, it's hypocritical and sickening to me. Okay.

But, but, but, but, HR, the name of every national HR conference is some version of, please, please, please let us participate in strategy and be with the big boys and girls, mainly boys. So, with safety, I don't see them part of that argument yet. I see them off somewhere.

See, I never saw them as players. They're never identified. They're never a part of the thing. I mean, unions consider worker health and safety bread and butter, but I don't know how much they work with the OHS people internally. They should be working hand in hand in the unionized environments. But long story short, OHS should be front and center because...here's why, they have an opportunity now because the headlines have gone beyond me too to talk about toxic work environments.

Those three words are magic. They extend beyond the non-discrimination law compliance because what they're basically talking about is bullying. They're talking about abusive conduct that goes above and beyond sexual harassment. By the way, from our own national data, we know that one in five bullying cases, there is a discriminatory component.

People could file for sexual harassment or racial discrimination or the rest. Now, toxic work environment is the presses term for generic workplace harassment. The broader form, the status blind, status neutral forms of mistreatment. Well, that's my bail away.

That's workplace bullying. That's abuse... And the name in our legislation, we don't even use workplace bullying, we use abusive conduct. But to me, that level of mainstream media attention should be the launching pad for OHS to get into the C-suite and say, we know what they're talking about and we can help you prevent this, prevent and correct any toxicity in the environment.

There are psychosocial work hazards. We can help identify them. This is not something subtle, this is a big deal. There's a study that I cite in our training, I think first author is, Hague, H-A-G-U-E, et al, and when there are any negative...when there's an assortment, a variety, a plethora of negative things happening in the workplace, when bullying is present, it is the dominant factor.

It is the most influential because it is the most destructive in terms of health harm and all the rest. So, these guys, the OHS people should be able to come in and say, I know...maybe they're too humble to say this, but we're the experts in toxic work environments. Who better? Because don't you see, it's the emphasis on the psychosocial rather than other kinds of things.

It has always been remarkable... The dominant research theme in unhealthy work prior to this discussion of, and the discovery of, the dialogue about psychosocial was the demand control hypothesis. The CARES Act demand control hypothesis studies in the workplace. Made famous by the White Hall studies in Britain where they followed British civil servants through their work careers well into retirement.

And it was always... Now, the demand control is where you...it's a situation where the employer simultaneously increases job demands, asking people to do much more while simultaneously decreasing their autonomy and their ability to contribute to the control of the job, what tasks they're doing.

So, demand increase, control loss simultaneous. Well, that phenomenon leads to what's called job strain, okay? Not bullying, but job strain. And our colleagues, Peter Schnall and the others at the Center for Social Epidemiology have worked decades on that.

Job strain causes cardiovascular disease, all right? So, it's a health hazard. They've known that forever. But that's low level compared to bullying. Along now comes this focus on the psychosocial safety climate. I think that can displace the demand control hypothesis, which it sounds academic and it is academic.

The academics go to the workplace, it's very applied, but it just doesn't sizzle. Toxic work environment has headlined sizzle. OHS, are you listening to me? You safety professionals. It's time to come out of the closet, raise, elevate your status within your organizations, and make known that you have what they need.

You want to put out the headline out toxic work environment and getting branded as such in your organization, we can help you. You want to show the C-Suite how it's preventable? Ask for a seat at the table. HR's been asking for decades. They don't deserve it.

You deserve it because you actually have something relevant and you can bring the science of the psychosocial safety climate research to bear and apply it in your organizations. You hold the key to snuffing out this toxic work environment so that company doesn't end up in a lawsuit with me as an expert complaining about their toxic work environment.

And so I think it's really critical that they rediscover or recommit to a new...I don't know, a new status. When I used to go into organizations, I never met with the safety people. Why would I? Because it was all about preventing broken legs and taking care of physical hazards and trip hazards and MSDS fact sheets and all that other stuff.

But no, no, no, now it's in the human realm. Don't you agree, Mary? I think I see an opportunity, but also I see a necessity because HR and legal are never going to fix this. Never.

- No HR and legal, I think, the impetus is external. I do see, and I mean I speak with guests in the safety profession who are focusing very hard on this, who are pushing it and arguing, you know, one told me, if you think about it, the risk factor, a psychological injury takes much longer to heal. It's a much bigger risk for the organization.

I mean, that's a bit mercenary, but it's true.

- Well, no. And they face turnover. The number one outcome is turnover. And they've lost. And who gets targeted we know are the best and the brightest. Not what you might think. It's not weak people.

The people who cannot defend themselves are also very good. But that's because partly, they're not focused on the political nature of the work, they're focused on the work itself. A target's mantra is, always been, and it drives me crazy, I just want to be left alone to do my job. Now, I'm talking to a person five years in and I said, "They haven't left you alone for five years. That's not your job anymore. Your job is survival. What are you going to do?"

But these are people committed to the work. They usually possess a higher level technical expertise. That's why they pose a threat to the envious and jealous types who can't handle it, who are so insecure and maldeveloped and all the rest. So yes, it has very much a business line, bottom line impact. You can make "the business case" for stopping bullying, which I think the OHS people need to make.

But I think they also need to make the case that I hate to say moral case, so maybe we don't do that. But if profess to have productive people, they cannot be working impaired. Now, be careful saying psychological injury only because what bullying triggers is a whole host of stress-related physical diseases.

- True. Yeah, yeah. Of course. Psychological injury. Yeah. There's clear evidence leading to, like you said, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, - Immunological, gastrointestinal, neurological, distress brain research. You love neuroscience, distress brain research is coming out stronger and stronger that the person is impaired due to the stressor of this toxic interpersonal relationship and relationships.

And then it's a moral injury when the institution betrays you and lets you down with their non-responsiveness. And so the person if they're isolated, they're on the way towards self-harm, suicidal ideation. Now, where in the hell is that not preventable? Justify continuing that and failing to prevent.

I can see an OHS person laying that out saying, "My God, look at what we're doing to the people. We're allowing this harm to be inflicted in the corporation's name."

- So, it sounds to me there's two things then...well, maybe more than two. But lobbying, I won't try and count how many, lobbying...I'm thinking of what our listeners who are OHS professionals can do. So, lobbying for a seat at the table, changing the language around it so people understand that this is, in fact, a health and safety issue.

- Under the umbrella, use the toxic work environment umbrella to introduce relevance. Go ahead.

- So, something that occurs to me as I'm kind of listing out, and I'd love to hear obviously any more advice you have for safety professionals, but I know that a lot of them feel like they have a lot on their plates. They have a lot of things to do. And I wonder if some listeners are thinking like, "Is this all on me now?" Like, is this ow also my responsibility?

Not that they don't want to be responsible, but just it's a lot. It's big.

- Now you sound like school teachers who say, "Oh, now you want me to do an anti-bullying initiative, get off my back. I'm these kids' parents. I buy their school supplies." And seriously, that has untracked a lot of the anti-bullying programs in the schools. The teacher says, "I'm exhausted. I have too much on my plate." I don't know what OHS practitioners have on their plate.

I really don't know. Give me a quick tutorial.

- Well, I mean...

- What are their priorities now?

- It's different. I mean, imagine identifying and preventing all kinds of risks, looking at critical risks versus less severe injuries. There's a lot of stuff, but let's keep with the teacher analogy. What would you say then to those teachers? Would you say, well, you're just derailing this, or would you say maybe you need to look at your own work situation if you're under that much stress?

- Well, it's actually gotten worse for teachers since COVID, right? Where now you've got this whole politically motivated parental movement where the right wing is pushing parents to undermine teacher authority and teacher everything. Yeah. They have untracked school bullying programs. They have in some places, but they still carry the weight because sometimes the states mandate that these programs be done.

And to their credit, the school bullying programs are producing generations of new workers who are coming up less accepting the tolerance for abuse. So, the younger workers aren't taking any crap the older workers took. Now, once again, go back to...I don't know what is filling the OHS internal department people's plate, but if employee loss and turnover from preventable health harm is not on their plate, what the hell is?

I mean, well, seriously, I'm wondering.

- But specifically, I guess the emphasis is, is this all on me? In other words, where...

- Oh, no, not all on you. No.

- Yeah, that's kind of like where would you advise that they look for allies or resources?

- Oh, you go back to factless HR and say, I'm going to help you out. Here's why you need to lobby for a policy in the absence of a law. These are the national statistics. Why don't we run an internal poll, internal survey, and not go just broad workplace climate and get wishy-washy about it, but let's ask people this?

Let's bring in the risk... No, no. I think form coalition. They don't have to carry this at all. I want them to be the catalyst for this coalition to convince the C-suite that this can no longer be ignored. Now, one of the things you're going to always run into politically, I'm going to tell you this now, OHS people, is when you go to the C-suite, one or two or three or four of them are going to be what we classify at WBI as executive sponsors.

They are the principal enablers of the senior managerial bullies. And they like their style, they've groomed them to be this particular way, or worse, is the research shows they're basically laissez-faire leaders, disengaged, and they don't give a hoot.

And they're more than willing to let the miscreants play and abuse people beneath them as long as they don't have to hear about it. And when and if the complaints do rise to that level, and Ted hears about Bob, the bully's Bob, bully's always Bob, and Ted says, well, he's my senior VP and he cuts my grass and he's my friend and he's a great guy, that's when they tend to fire the complainants.

That's the DARVO application and all of the rest. So, please know that you're not going to an open-minded, neutral set of executives by any means. So, you can't go up there singlehandedly. They're going to say, "Hey, health and safety, stay in your lane."

They don't even know what your lane is. So, I'm saying, I think you need to form a coalition. One, you need to educate HR about the health. So, you're going to have to get educated yourself. And there are ways to do that. We can teach you a lot at WBI and we have the only comprehensive curriculum on it. So there's my plug.

I'm in the middle of doing university now. The next one's not till February 2023. But the point is there are resources for you, educate HR, compel HR to work with you to actually have them create a behavioral standard or a policy, or at the very least, a code of conduct to directly address this, outside of the violence policy or as a supplement to the violence policy, but not as part of the anti-harassment or non-discrimination policies.

Let's get it straight. I'm talking for an American audience in that it is entirely legal in every state and you confuse people when you try and conflate the illegal harassment with the legal bullying. Okay. All right. So having said that, you could put it in the violence policy, but best to stand alone to give it the attention it deserves.

Then you want to get legal. You have to show legal that this is a litigation mitigator. You're reducing legal risk. And for that, I also want you to reach out if you're in a large enough organization to the risk management department or the risk manager who has actually financially put a price tag on all the turnover attributable to Bob.

They know that Bob is personally responsible for the departure of 18 people in the last 3 years. And those people were hard to replace. So, now you make the business case. Turnover, the cost of the absenteeism, all the pay time off for all of the hourly staff and managerial staff and everybody else. The cost of mounting a defense or paying out disability insurance or workers' comp.

All right. You got that going. And, of course, of the severance was paid to those 18 people, that, if indeed. Most likely most weren't given a severance. Or those who went and filed a lawsuit and went through discovery and you had to pay out a settlement. The risk people know the dollars and cents associated with Bob.

Just ask him, they've been dying to tell somebody that Bob is a cost center, not a profit center, a cost center, a liability machine. So, now you've got all these liabilities, you've got the business case. You try and get HR to be the policy advocate and say, "No, we really don't have something to directly address it. So yeah, you thought we did."

Because executive is going to say, "Well, we have policies for that." "No, you have very narrowly defined policies to be compliant with non-discrimination laws, but not really with this health stuff." Now, here's the beauty in Canada, you've got what most of the provinces, except BC have done, is they've varied the bullying and inside the OHS regulations.

So, a person can claim health regulatory violations if they were bullied, or they also put in the non-discrimination stuff. So, you can choose, do you want to go the employment law route, or do you want to go the OHS route? So, again, that's fairly forward-thinking. I would give that option to employees in your organization, say, well, you can file...maybe if we do a policy violation thing, or it's one of our internal regulations, our codes, and you can claim a health claim, then you would take it out of HR's hands by the way.

Then you could have an investigation done by I think more educated thinkers and scientifically oriented people in OHS who are more likely to do less political. Of course, once you're internal and if you're going to get defensive on behalf of the organization and circle the wagons with the rest of them, I can't do anything for you.

I'm looking for an ethical infrastructure to be built inside organizations. And I guess obviously, ultimately, that's what I want that coalition to lobby for. How should we ethically be responsive to people who are harmed by our hands, at our hands, on our behalf, in our name?

And if the conclusion is blame the victim, then it's an unethical place. It needs to be one that says, "No, we'll take responsibility for that." And you'll build in accountability over time because that's all workers want, accountability.

- So, you touched on anti-bullying programs and schools making a change. Have you seen any changes in the way that workplace bullying is approached over the course of, you know, your work in this field? And what do you see for...well, you've mentioned some things, but what do you see coming up next in the future of this kind of change awareness?

- I see universities adopting better, more clearly defined anti-bullying policies and calling it that, which just that's my original employers of choice, my original industry, my original chosen career. So, that's heartwarming.

But then I also face them in lawsuits when they have the policy and they don't enforce it. So, policies are good, but policies without enforcement ring hollow. So, I want to see that. I think, well, I have an idealized future in mind. Probably won't happen in my lifetime, Mary, but right now, so many people are displaced by bullying.

We could just work backwards. I actually calculated the numbers. But in our latest, again, US data, approximately, when I extrapolate the percentages to the size of the workforce, we've got 48 million workers plus 48.6 million workers directly being bullied. We know that 67% of the bullied workers are going to lose that job either through constructive discharge, termination, or voluntary quiting.

And I guess I should apply that. Anyway, many millions of people are displaced. How do they explain their displacement? How do they explain losing that last job? Through no fault of their own, by the way, because they didn't invite it, nor is it deserved. It turns out it's usually some version of fraud, lying, falsified performance appraisals, and institutional collapse on them.

That whole DARVO process and the rest. Okay. Where it needs to go in the future is that the displaced person needs to have the ability to say, I was bullied out of the last workplace. It was a toxic place to work and unsafe for any reasonable person to be expected to stay and be productive.

In other words, use the safety thing. I was made unsafe and then I was harangued for complaining about the lack of safety. So, here I am applying for the job with you. Tell me how you are going to be safer. Bingo. And they say, "Oh, well, actually we have policies in place and we prefer to be employers of choice, not like that last dump where you came from.

That's my idealized future. But right now, the bullied displaced worker has no explanation that they can give in the next job interview that'll be acceptable. It all falls on them. They've got a hole in their record. And no matter how innovatively they craft their resume to provide references of customers, clients, and everybody who can attest to their skill, what does next employer always do?

I see you didn't list your manager here. Well, we didn't get along well. These are the people that can going to attest to my work and you're hiring me for that work. And they'll say, no, no, and they go find the manager and that manager will then defame them.

And I would like to see that end. I would like to have the alternative be the individual can say proudly that I was not safe there and the shame is brought on the organization instead of themselves. You asked what are some of the initial feelings, the self-blame, that would not even be an option. You have made me unsafe. It's a crazy-making place.

I can't tolerate being here. That's where I'd like to see it go. Will it? I don't know. It's going to take a long time. It's going to take a long time. In the U.S., we're not that kind of country.

Canada's a little more Eurocentric and I like that. I think you have to be someone from one of the advanced democratic socialist countries where bullying was discovered and has been codified in the law. And when their national prevalence rate hits 2% to 3%, they panic because it's so high Versus the U.S. where it's 30%, no big deal, room for growth.

- We're coming up on time, unfortunately, because this is fascinating, but I do want to get to a couple of questions that I typically ask my guests. So, the first one is, where would you, or which non-technical skill, if you were say teaching tomorrow safety professionals, so you're not teaching them, you know, regulatory issues or industrial hygiene, which kind of human relations or non-technical or soft skill do you think is the most important for them to develop?

- Well, selfishly, workplace bullying, but specifically, the range of stress-related adverse health impacts on people. I want them to learn that range. I want them to see the science on that.

They can speak then with compassion and authority on the topic. I think it's central to be educated about that.

- If you could go back in time, and I'll let you choose the moment in time, the beginning of your career or this chapter in your career, what is one piece of advice that you would give young Gary or younger Gary?

- Hold onto your hair, but how? That's interesting. Wow. Because I have had these two chapters, the academic chapter and then when what happened to my wife hit us that we needed to do this. We didn't originally think we needed to do this.

We wanted to help any American organization that was active in the bullying field, but there was none, and there still really is no other that does what we do. What would I advise? Mary...

- It's not meant to be...

- How do you stop the man who can't shut up. I can't figure out. What would I advise? Probably, no. I would... I was going...here's what I was going to say. Maybe along the way, we should have taken care of financial matters more than throwing our entire heart and soul into helping only bully targets, but there's no movement without bully targets.

So that's who we helped. We could have sold, others would've advised us, stop talking about bullying and sell incivility. Employers will buy that. Sell that. But you know what? Incivility is a minor form of disruption in people's lives and it's not bullying. Bullying is uncivil, yeah, it's disrespectful, but bullying is not those alone.

Incivility is not bullying and it's almost entirely concretely different phenomenon, distinct. So, people would've told us to do that, and we didn't, so I'm now thinking juggling, should Gary...should we have done that to take care of ourselves financially so it wasn't such a bumpy ride along the way?

No, screw it. We did what we did and we stood our ground and it cost us. I mean, we had already done 10 years of business consulting, selling to HR and other entities. I was always doing the executive retreats, the high-paying fun executive retreats at the beach, but I also knew nothing would come of those things.

We weren't affecting any change. At least now when a client does come to us sincerely wanting something in bullying, they know the seriousness and I can bring change to that organization.

- So, your advice is stick to your guns?

- Yeah. We're sticking to our guns because you just can't go back and recheck your integrity. You can't reinvent it. And sometimes integrity costs money, but what the hell? I mean, you know, it's a matter of legacy now for us and moving on. We're training younger generations of people in our training program and I need to more closely track how they're moving forward either with their businesses or within their organizations or whatever.

But got another new crop. Just the time of this recording, we're between our two training weekends because everything's by Zoom now. And I got go-ins in there. We got to do it. We've planted the seeds and we're growing trees and they're saplings now.

And we're not going to see them be sturdy oaks. And that's the only...it's not resentment. It's the only bad timing we've had is it struck me and Ruth in our 40s. And, of course, it comes uninvited. You don't know when this stuff is going to hit you, bullying. That's the nature of it.

She's ran into a bad boss after several good ones. And we were in our 40s, so we were not able...I wish we could have got another 20 years out had it hit us in our 20s. But then I go backwards and say, but I didn't know Ruth in my 20s. So, we'll take it as it comes. You can't go back with regret. There's no doubt about that.

I think we made some good choices, bad fiscal choices, but money isn't everything. I know that we have affected millions through the years and I think I'd like to use this podcast as a recruitment tool to the OHS people to make this part of their legacy. Make this part...I do want to put it on their plate and shove something irrelevant off because this is a bigger deal and get going and get your organizations to listen to you.

I wish you luck. I wish you elevated status. As far as I'm concerned, you're way more important and critical than HR. So, go prove it.

- One of the things you had advised was learning more, educating yourself. So, are there some resources that you would specifically recommend to listeners who want to learn more about this? They want to educate. They want to maybe see where their jurisdiction is at with their legislation.

- Well, just contact me. We will put you in touch with either people already working on the ground, or if you want to be the citizen lobbyist because that's how we've had the bill introduced in all those states, amateurs. We never take a sack of cash to a lawmaker's office. We don't have it.

We bring a strong moral argument that it's time for something to be done to address this last form of abuse in America and deal with it. Just contact me directly and we'll go from there. There's a contact form at the WBI website and you can find us at workplacebullying.org.

- Okay. Yeah. We will link to that in the show notes for sure. And yeah, so if you want to talk to Dr. Namie, reach out through your website. Okay.

- That's it.

- Well, that is, unfortunately, all the time we have for today. Thanks to our subscribers, and thanks so much to you for sharing your expertise, Gary.

- Thank you, Mary. Thank you for helping me reach a totally new audience. And I'm hopeful for them. Thank you. And also, as always, my thanks to the "Safety Labs by Slice" team where there is nary a bully in sight. Bye for now. Safety Labs is created by Slice, the only safety knife on the market with a finger-friendly blade.

Find us at sliceproducts.com. Until next time, stay safe.