I travel around the world speaking on the topic of workplace bullying and I’m always asked one question: Where do I start?
The answer is with an exercise that will get the conversation going about workplace bullying, and more importantly, workplace civility.
During your next company-wide meeting break your attendees into groups of four and give them 15 minutes to answer this question: How would you like to be treated by your peers and managers?
If your company is too large or spread out to do company-wide meetings, or if you just don’t have them, you can always pass this exercise along to the department heads and let them run the exercise in their own teams. If you’re in California, you could also do this with managers and supervisors in the next sexual harassment training since you’ll already be on the topic of how to behave – and not behave – at work.
After 15 minutes ask each group to share their answers. As they call them out, write them on a whiteboard or large sheet of paper. Or you can type them out onto a Word document that is projected onto a screen. This is an important step in the exercise because they need to see that their desires and needs are similar. They will realize that they all want the same things. I’ve done this exercise many times in many organizations of all industries and sizes, and the list is always the same few items. We’re all humans and we all just want to be valued and we all just want to be treated with civility. Period.
Once you’ve completed the exercise, go back to your desk and group similar items together in order to make a more manageable list. I often just start making categories as I see them, and then move bullet points into the categories where it seems they fit. For example, you may notice a trend of bullet points that say, “acknowledge,” “praise,” “say thank you,” and “recognize others’ good work.” You can put those bullet points all into a category called, “Appreciation.” You may also notice there are several bullet points around communication, such as, “listen,” “use a civil tone of voice,” and “share information with everyone who needs it.” You might then create a category called, “Effective Communication.”
If you’d like an example, here’s a document created during a training with one of my clients. This is the document that was projected on the screen and filled in as groups shouted out their answers. In this case I ran five training sessions, and each session ended with this exercise. I just kept projecting the same document and adding to it. (A meeting attendee typed out the answers while I facilitated the collection.) From there, I created this document, which compiled the behaviors I collected into a set of three values and provided a description of what those three values meant. The descriptions come from the variety of answers I received in each of the three categories.
These two documents highlight the power of this exercise. I had four pages of behaviors and in the end was able to whittle them into three categories: respectful communication, trust, and teamwork. Realizing they all shared the same dream was powerful for them, and now they could come together and decide how to make it happen.
Now that you have whittled your own list down into something manageable you can use this consolidated list for all sorts of things. For starters you can put them in the healthy workplace policy. You’ll get buy-in for the policy because the behaviors the employees are being held accountable to came straight from them.
You’ll also be able to use your list of behaviors for a variety of other things such as a social vision statement, corporate values, performance management, lunch-n’-learns, rewards programs, and more.
Contact me if you need any help. I’m happy to help you figure out what to do with the ground rules gleaned from this exercise.
One example of using the ground rules to end workplace bullying involves one of my clients who worked with people with disabilities. Their mission was to help people with disabilities in their community participate in the community as much as they were able. They wanted people with disabilities to thrive – whatever that meant for each individual client given their disability.
They realized that workplace bullying was keeping their own organizational members from thriving in the community because they were unleashing unhappy people into the community at the end of each workday. After a training from me about workplace bullying and how to change the culture, we completed this exercise I am describing to you here in this post. Eventually they came up with the social vision, “A place to thrive” and revamped their corporate values to represent the behaviors that came out of this exercise.
Now employees could feel like they were thriving, and in turn could help clients thrive. Anyone who wasn’t on board with the new way of life and the new values either left on their own or was let go. Those that were let go were let go under the guise of being ill-fit with the culture. Since they were given a chance to demonstrate the values via performance improvement plans, the organization suffered no liability for unemployment insurance or wrongful termination. The organization had effectively tied together the vision, the values, and performance.
Ultimately, the best part about this program is that your actions will tell employees you are ready to listen to complaints about workplace bullying and incivility. Listening will get you the information you need to make a business case to your C-Suite for making change, and it will give you an idea of where to start.
Contact me if you need any help.
