Workplace Bullying and How it’s Costing You Money

fter February’s reports of the bullying of Jonathan Martin, a Miami Dolphin, employers throughout Florida are taking a harder look at bullying in the workplace. While many of us would like to believe that the stories we see in the headlines are simply those one-in-a-million types of incidents, bullying is more prominent than you might expect. In 2012, a report from Career Builder revealed that nearly 35 percent of employees have, at one point or another, been the victim of bulling in the workplace.

Despite this, most of us are still hesitant to talk about it. Even the victims, who suffer the most because of these actions, hesitate to actually report the problems.

Defining Workplace Bullying

As an employer, you want everyone who works for you to feel safe and secure in the workplace. However, unless you know what bullying actually looks like, and how it’s affecting your Sarasota jobs, you won’t be able to take action against it.

Workplace bullying is defined as ‘the consistent and often repeated mistreatment of one or more individuals in a way that harms their mental or physical health.’ It typically appears one of the following ways:

• Interference with an employees work, or sabotaging them in such a way that they can not perform their daily tasks.
• Verbal abuse
• Offensive behaviors that intimidate, threaten, or humiliate workers