According to a recent Unison survey, one in three local government workers has been subjected to bullying in the past six months. Is that an accurate picture of what’s happening in our town halls? Shaun Campbell reports
April 2010
Did you fall for the Guardian’s April Fool? Plenty of people did, including, by his own admission, the paper’s long-serving political correspondent and assistant editor, Michael White. If you missed it, the spoof was a ‘news’ story about how Labour was seeking to make a virtue out of Gordon Brown’s robust management style in an election poster campaign. The lead poster had a close-up photo of the PM in full glower with a ‘step outside posh boy’ headline and a ‘vote Labour, or else’ tagline.
All very amusing, but without getting too po-faced about an April Fool stunt, there is a less funny side to explore. If we can make a joke out of the nation’s senior public servant’s propensity for throwing epic temper tantrums (and mobile phones), what does it say for our general attitude towards bullying in the workplace?
Precise information on the scale of bullying in council workplaces is hard to find. A 2008 local government survey (Time for a Change) by the leading public sector union, Unison, concluded that while verbal abuse from service users was the most common form of harassment, bullying was the second most serious issue, with 16.8% experiencing it themselves and almost a quarter (24.1%) seeing it happen to a colleague.
A growing problem?
A more recent Unison survey (Workplace Bullying and Harassment in 2009) conducted online found that more than one in three workers (34.5%) said they had been bullied by colleagues or managers in the past six months, and that for more than one in five (21.7%) the experience was ongoing. A similar Unison survey carried out back in 1997 found that 18% of respondents said they had been bullied in the past six months, which suggests that the problem has doubled in scale in the intervening dozen years.
The survey’s author, Charlotte Rayner, professor of human resource management at Portsmouth Business School, concedes that there might be a number of explanations for this escalation. “Our work environments might be worse, or we are better at labelling what has happened to us in 2009 than we were in 1997, or a combination of both,” she says. The victims of bullying may also have been more motivated by their experiences to complete the online questionnaire, skewing the findings in that direction.
Those caveats aside, the survey throws up some intriguing findings. Gender, for example, makes no appreciable difference with 34.2% of men and 34.6% of women reporting being bullied. We tend to think that bullies like to single out the person they pick on, that there’s an element of the personal in that behaviour.
In fact, most people – just over 80% – are bullied in groups, usually of between two and five people, though 30% of the survey’s respondents claimed their whole department was bullied. This might let the perpetrator off the hook in terms of discrimination (ie they treat everyone equally badly), but it also indicates a systemic, institutionalised form of bullying where the working practices are as much at fault as the personalities involved.
The fine print of the survey shows that those who count themselves bullied consider being kept outside the loop, given meaningless tasks, set unrealistic targets and subjected to excessive work monitoring as their chief grievances, far outweighing physical or verbal abuse and threats.
Local government emerges from the survey less tainted by bullying than most other public sector organisations. Although 33% of council workers say they have been bullied in the past six months, the problem looks worse for staff in further and higher education (both 36%), and schools (39%). The highest figures are recorded in the health care sector (42%) and, here’s a surprise, the voluntary sector (43%).
Even the Department of Communities and Local Government (CLG) doesn’t escape untainted – their annual report, published in 2009, suggested a “persistence of a poor management culture” in CLG, which so far the organisation had failed to tackle in any consistent way. “We do not doubt departmental senior management’s commitment to deal with the problem – we continue to doubt, however, whether it is doing so in the most effective way” the report chastised.
Dealing with the bullies
There isn’t a council in the country that doesn’t have a workplace anti-bullying strategy in place. ‘Zero tolerance’ is a phrase I’ve heard often enough in my ring-rounds. But their main thrust in this area is directed towards stamping out bullying in schools, training council workers to counter abuse and threatening behaviour in their dealings with the public, and responding to gender, race, religion and disability discrimination legislation.
Their record in these fields is pretty good but there is little evidence of a concerted drive towards driving out bullying from their own workplaces. Is that because they don’t think there’s a problem, or because its primary cause is the top-down, tick-box, command and control policy imposed from central government, which they are powerless to counteract?
Further reading: Edge investigates what it’s like to be branded a bully