Karima-Catherine Goundiam is the founder and chief executive officer of digital strategy firm Red Dot Digital and business matchmaking platform B2BeeMatch.
Despite anti-harassment policies, sometimes workplace bullies get away with terrible behaviour for a long time. Especially if a bully is a high performer, the boss may be loath to let them go, thinking that the trade-off is worth it. “They’re just a go-getter. People need to be less sensitive.”
But the drawbacks to keeping a bully on staff outweigh any benefits that might arise. Here are six reasons why bullies need to go:
1. Your company image is at stake
Image isn’t everything … but it sure is a lot. We’re living in the era of social media and online reviews. If your workplace bully has a public-facing role, eventually their bad behaviour will get noticed and the internet will find out.
We’re also living in a time of plummeting employee loyalty. Even the most optimistic takes on the subject say that employee loyalty is becoming more transactional. Employees today have low tolerance for being poorly treated, and they don’t mind burning bridges – including on company review sites where prospective employees check for bad workplaces before they even apply.
2. Bullies compromise employee retention
As the classic saying goes, people don’t leave companies, they leave managers. If your company bully holds a managerial role, your employee turnover can skyrocket, costing the company time and money.
I would take it a step further and argue that people also leave colleagues. Even if your company bully isn’t a manager, they can do serious harm to team cohesion and create a lot of chaos and damage in a short time.
Early in my time in the corporate world, I was bullied by a manager who stripped me of my resources and isolated me so I was unable to do my job. I filed an internal complaint, which was rejected. I consulted with lawyers, who advised me to simply quit, and I followed their advice for my own well-being though I knew it wasn’t fair. Soon after, my former colleagues lodged a group complaint and that manager was fired. The company lost me, but they came very close to losing the whole team.
3. The company may face HR issues or lawsuits
In Canada, federally regulated companies are required by law to have anti-harassment policies in place, and other companies face similar requirements under various provincial laws. Ideally, nobody ever has to use the mechanisms set out in these policies – prevention is much more efficient. But even one complaint can require significant time and investment, whether it’s handled internally or by a specialized external firm.
If a bullied employee isn’t satisfied with the internal process, they might take it outside, just as I almost did. According to KPMG, “In the past few years, wrongful dismissal actions, mental distress claims and class actions based on discrimination and harassment have become more common, and the damages recovered by employees have increased significantly.”
4. Bullies are bad for innovation
All the evidence shows that innovation happens in environments where collaboration is encouraged and team members have free rein to be creative. But a typical bully is anything but collaborative; instead, they try to control and intimidate others. People aren’t willing to take risks or share ideas when they feel attacked, so your company’s innovation can stagnate if a bully is poisoning the team. When a person spends all their mental energy managing hostile workplace dynamics, they’re not at their creative best.
5. Bullies are bad for diversity, equity and inclusion
We know that classic corporate structures are often unfriendly to members of under-represented groups (Black, Indigenous and people of colour, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people and women). According to Psychology Today, “bullying is a distinctive pattern of repeatedly and deliberately harming and humiliating others, specifically those who are smaller, weaker, younger or in any way more vulnerable than the bully.” In the workplace, that often means picking on employees who are of lower status – which often means more marginalized employees.
Bullies can undermine all your company’s hard work on DEI by making the workplace hostile to people they see as vulnerable, and thus sap away the well-documented innovation benefits of a diverse team.
6. Bullying shifts the corporate culture in a negative direction
A bully never acts alone. To get away with their behaviour, they require enablers: people willing to look the other way, play devil’s advocate, minimize inappropriate conduct and discourage victims from standing up for themselves or reporting incidents. Over time, the good people notice the toxicity and leave, so just bullies and enablers remain. And that is the very definition of a toxic work environment.
It’s difficult to heal a toxic, dysfunctional company culture. This is why it’s so important to deal with workplace bullies fast and firmly. It may seem like they’re harming just one person, but left in place, they’ll do immeasurable damage to the company as a whole. To protect your company and the bottom line, you need to give bullies the boot.
This column is part of Globe Careers’ Leadership Lab series, where executives and experts share their views and advice about the world of work. Find all Leadership Lab stories at tgam.ca/leadershiplab and guidelines for how to contribute to the column here.
