The Bully-Free Workplace: Stop Jerks, Weasels, and Snakes From Killing Your Organization

Positive Preliminary Steps to Take

There is a modified method of introducing the topic of bullying within the organization: measure the extent of bullying, then brief executives.

Prevalence Assessment

People in your organization who don't see bullying as a problem need you to convince them that indeed it is. They may be empiricists by nature, who don't believe anything unless they have experienced it, and are likely part of the 50 percent of the population in our 2010 Workplace Bullying Institute (WBI) national survey who have neither suffered nor witnessed bullying. You can't bully them simply to convince them, but you can assess prevalence and use it to provide the “proof” that they need. We make available—free to organizations of any size—an online survey to which all employees can be directed. Some survey items include:

• Our definition of workplace bullying to which the employee can claim knowledge as a current target or as a witness or report no knowledge of it in any way (allowing comparisons with the national prevalence rates of 9 percent, 15 percent, and 50 percent, respectively)
• Employees' perception of current safety from harm by psychological violence at work
• An estimate of confidence in their employer's current ability to stop bullying when reported using existing policies and procedures
• An estimate of confidence in their employer's current willingness to stop bullying when reported
• If bullying is experienced, an identification of the gender and rank of the principal ...