Changing a workplace culture of bullying and violence
Source: WorkplaceOHS
Date: 20/9/05
Workplace cultures of bullying and violence can have catastrophic effects on productivity, but the solutions are relatively easy to implement, according to an expert in changing workplace cultures.
Martha Knox-Haly – an organisational psychologist who works with businesses to promote team building and prevent occupational stress and bullying – says it can take as little as ‘two weeks’ to turn around a dysfunctional workplace culture.
Working on relationships
In other cases, she and her colleagues at MKA: Risk Mitigation will spend three or four months working closely with both management and employees, teaching skills such as effective communication, conflict resolution and stress management techniques.
Knox-Haly, who will be a special guest speaker at a NSCA Sydney seminar tomorrow (see details below), says her methods have been successful in achieving a reduction of 70-100% in stress claims, as well as a reduction of 50-100% in physical lost time injuries. The potential savings to organisations can be in the ‘hundreds of thousands’ of dollars, she said.
After conducting a risk assessment, which includes assessing workplace attitudes with a culture survey and reviewing workers compensation data and injury statistics, she designs a program to help ‘management and workers to have a viable working relationship’.
Her methods range from executive coaching, team building sessions and fatigue management training, to strategies designed to ‘build alliances’ at all levels across an organisation.
Call centre workers hung up on personal conflict
In a small call centre of about 50 employees, Knox-Haly’s program resulted in workers compensation statistics falling from half a dozen claims in the year before the program was introduced, to none in the year after it was implemented.
The manager had some health problems which meant that he rarely left his office to talk to the front line staff on the floor, Knox-Haly said. He also developed relationships mainly with ‘high performance employees’.
‘Often good performers tend to be very task-focused, and are often seen as very abrupt and not good communicators’, Knox-Haly said. In this workplace, the high performers were seen by others to be ‘leveraging’ their favoured positions to bully poorer performers and part-timers, or those who wanted to do training courses.
Knox-Haly arranged for some good strong supervisors who could support the manager in handling staff issues, and she implemented a team building program where issues could be talked about more openly.
Communication styles
There were ‘very hostile’ and unexpressed negative feelings in the workplace, Knox-Haly said, but rather than being talked about openly, people were ‘gossiping behind each other's backs’.
A key part of the program was to teach staff effective communication methods and conflict resolution techniques. Follow up sessions involved one-on-one coaching and reinforcement of the key messages; employees were asked how they had used the skills they’d been taught in the workplace.
Effective communication is a key to a productive workplace, and you don’t want to lose otherwise good employees because of their personal styles, Knox-Haly said. ‘You don’t want to write someone off just because they have an unfortunate manner’, she said.
Where possible it is better to deal with these problems informally. ‘Make it quite clear that the way they are perceived as behaving is not OK before you bring in performance management [processes] and disciplinary procedures’.
Knox-Haly’s three key tips
- Teach managers how to do performance management effectively – so that they motivate people without punishing them or by using heavy-handed approaches.
- Teach managers how to create good relationships in the workplace.
- Ensure you have an anti-bullying policy in place.
Seminar details
Martha Knox-Haly will be addressing a NSCA seminar at Harris Park in Sydney on the issue of bullying and how it undermines corporate strategic performance this Wednesday 21 September from 4.30pm-6.00pm.
For more information, contact Kate Allen on 02 9687-6299 or email, kate.allen@nsca.org.au.
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