|
When Myke van Iersel returned to tidy up her
classroom after school something snapped. The Waiheke High School health and
physical education teacher had just called some of her colleagues gutless
wimps for not standing up and saying what they thought about principal Anne
Willmann's management style and problems with senior management.
Her fellow teachers held back their views because the
principal's husband, a teacher at the school, had refused to leave the May
2002 staff meeting.
But his presence hadn't stopped the feisty van Iersel, who
had let fly with a barrage of accusations. Feeling betrayed, she went to her
classroom where she felt she might throw up. The walls were closing in.
"My body felt as though there was an electrical current
going through it, like I was hot-wired, and I just knew I couldn't cope any
more. I think I had a nervous breakdown."
Van Iersel didn't think then that she was a target of
workplace bullying. That belief came later, in 2003 when she read management
consultant Andrea Needham's Workplace Bullying - A Costly Business Secret,
which includes case studies and personal accounts of bullying in New Zealand.
Needham believes the phenomenon is pervasive in our work culture
- so much so that she subtitled her address to this year's industrial
relations conference "silent epidemic, national scandal".
Bullying - such a loaded word. And how odd that it might be
happening to teachers, responsible for stamping out the practice in the
playground.
But the bullying talked about here is a very different beast
- one that targets the successful and the strong, driven by an addiction to
control. It is also largely invisible to others. As van Iersel and thousands
of other targets have found out, one person's bullying is another's
performance management technique.
The day after her breakdown van Iersel went to her doctor
and was given a medical certificate for work-related stress. Her blood
pressure was apparently so high that the doctor had to wait until the next
day to get a proper reading. She was off work for 4 1/2 months.
When she returned to school things went from bad to worse.
The principal once again seemed to be on her back for every little thing -
even sending a note to Van Iersel's head of department about her attitude to
exercise, apparently gleaned from an overheard conversation in the toilets.
More serious was the disciplinary charge concerning
derogatory comments she had made about the principal to a teacher aide -
later dropped. In February 2003 van Iersel gave up. When her head of
department resigned, so did she, walking away from 21 years in the profession
and vowing never to go back.
"People who are targeted are broken for life. I've met
shells of people all over New Zealand," says Needham.
Hadyn Olsen, manager of Workplaces Against Violence in
Employment (Wave), says his organisation gets about 15 calls a week to its
0800 zerobully helpline. He believes statistics here are on a par with
Australia, where research indicates one in four workers is bullied.
The work environment picture Olsen and Needham paint gets
scarier still when they talk about "chronics", aka "corporate
psychopaths" or "snakes in suits". Run for the hills.
"Not all chronics are psychopathic, but they may have
mild symptoms of psychopathy," says Olsen, adding that he has worked
with about 400 bullies in the past 10 years and estimates about 20 per cent
are never going to change.
Olsen says the problem is exacerbated because many employers
seek out the ruthless, superficially charming and impulsive qualities of the
corporate psychopath.
"A lot of employers say, 'Look, we hire people with
these characteristics - they get results, work well on their own and present
themselves really well'."
He warns employers about the chronic's dark side - they are
not team players, don't handle conflict very well, have very low empathy, are
manipulative and deceitful and have a Jekyll and Hyde type of character.
"They are very ambitious, often seek positions of power
and do well on KPIs (key performance indicators). But unfortunately they
often destroy people in the process."
Van Iersel is convinced she was the target of a workplace
bully - someone who systematically undermined her confidence and made life
unbearable for her.
On the face of it, her assertive, some say aggressive and
formidable, presence makes it hard to imagine anyone brow-beating her.
Yet that is her claim, backed by acres of documents and
anecdotes. She talks of dirty looks, not being acknowledged in the corridor,
being singled out and being micromanaged daily. Then there was the
"professional ambush" when she was called unprepared to a meeting
to be formally confronted by anonymous complaints.
But van Iersel was not on her own. She and eight other
teachers complained in 2003 to Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) about the
stress they were suffering as a result of workplace bullying. It was an issue
that divided the community, spilling out to the streets in an ugly protest by
some parents and pupils against the board of trustees and the principal last
May.
Workplace bullying is a relatively recent phenomenon in New
Zealand, first researched in 1997 when the Challenge Violence Trust in
Rotorua found 67 per cent of those attending its programmes who admitted to
committing domestic violence also admitted to committing forms of
psychological violence and abuse in the workplace.
The issue became more visible last year when it was alleged
a number of staff at Cambridge High School had been systematically bullied
into submission to principal Alison Annan's regime.
A survey by the Post Primary Teachers Association found that
8 per cent of teachers experience bullying regularly from management. But
although schools provide notable examples - the most recent being accusations
of staff bullying at Glenfield College - the phenomenon is not restricted to
the education sector.
Last year the banking workers' union Finsec surveyed staff
in two banks and found 40 per cent said they had been bullied in the past
year.
In that survey the most common form was public humiliation -
being dressed down in front of staff or customers. In nursing, the phenomenon
has been called "horizontal violence" - referring to the way people
are attacked or undermined in a covert manner by their peers.
Then there's "mobbing", when a group bullies an
individual, similar to the way some bird species peck at and harass one of
their flock to destroy them or drive them out.
Syd Thickpenny is reluctant to speak to the Herald. He
doesn't believe it will do any good because he's tried all the proper
channels - the school's board of trustees, the PPTA, the Education Review
Office, OSH - and no one is listening.
"No one can accept this is real. There is no mechanism
in New Zealand for getting rid of a principal," says the ex-Waiheke High
School head of department.
He is also uncomfortable. "Perhaps you can tell from my
demeanour and my voice that even though it's three years past, how much it
upsets me. I'm moving from one foot to the other and starting to sweat."
He says the bullying process is insidious. "They really
do attack people like myself who are successful - they see us as some sort of
subconscious threat to their authority."
Thickpenny departed quietly in 2002, leaving behind 22 years
of teaching and a reputation as a highly dedicated, tough but fair teacher
who had brought about exceptional exam results with some of the most
difficult kids in the school.
"I had sleepless nights. I was becoming very ill. I was
having psychological and physical problems, stress-related rashes. I couldn't
sleep on the Sundays before school started.
"My jaw started locking up. I couldn't walk past the
principal's office. I avoided the staffroom. I needed to leave."
Things got so bad he was terrified he would lose his cool
with the principal and lose his teaching certificate. When he quit he had 180
days' sick leave owing. It was a matter of pride that he never took days off.
The OSH investigation of Waiheke High in July 2003 turned
into farce. After a preliminary investigation, OSH wrote a draft report
requested by the school's limited statutory manager. He had been appointed in
November 2003 following dysfunction within the board of trustees and a
scathing ERO report in 2002 which found the school had "a divided senior
management team and aspects of low staff morale".
The draft report, which apparently talked extensively about
the bullying allegations, was put on the staff notice board for comment. But
it was quickly taken down by the principal, who promptly visited her lawyer
and succeeded in getting its contents permanently suppressed by the courts.
OSH released a revised, watered-down final report 11 months
later, in February this year. The complainants see it as a whitewash. The
word "bullying" is used just once and the report finds "no
clear evidence, ie, medical diagnosis, to prove that stress, as serious harm,
has occurred to any of the staff interviewed".
Adding insult to injury, from the complainants' point of
view, OSH also gave the principal some form of financial compensation. OSH is
well aware of workplace bullying. It has received 12 complaints in 2003, 34
in 2004 and five so far this year. It has eight cases still open, but so far
hasn't made any prosecutions.
OSH's main problem is that it doesn't yet have a definition
of what workplace bullying is, making it impossible to categorise the
behaviour as a "workplace hazard" under the Health and Safety in
Employment Act. What it can look for is work-related stress, something that's
normally identified through medical certificates or psychological reports.
The difficulty here, as lawyer Barbara Buckett points out,
is "trial by doctor", where the doctor pronounces work-related
stress, but the employer says the doctor can't possibly know what's actually
happening in the work environment.
"OSH has a high threshold and is normally very
reluctant to find there is an unsafe work environment because of bad
behaviour," says Buckett. "I think they see it as a floodgates
thing. They are conservative and THEY don't want to identify it as a health
hazard."
OSH business support manager Keith Stewart says the service
is developing guidelines on workplace bullying, something it expects to
complete in six months.
"We haven't said it doesn't exist. OSH has always
accepted that bullying in the workplace is an issue. You can try and shoehorn
it into the Health and Safety Act or you can look at it in terms of the wider
workplace relationships."
But the Employment Relations Act isn't any better. The
Herald spoke to a Government department employee who began a personal
grievance claim after a good performance assessment by his manager was
downgraded by a more senior manager without consultation.
The employee (we'll call him David) alleged it was a part of
a bullying campaign which caused him to take stress leave. With his pay
stopped and $24,000 gone on legal bills, he is now on a sickness benefit.
It took five months to get to mediation and nine months to
get an offer on the table, an offer he refused because it incorrectly states
"all matters have been resolved" and because he was gagged from
talking about it.
Olsen agrees that those who are bullied often get victimised
again by the very process they're using for redress. Having to front up to
face-to-face mediation is particularly unfair.
"I've taken people to mediation and they've vomited
before they've got there. They've arrived shaking and sweating and I've then
had to try and convince the mediator that we don't want to be in the same
room."
There's a similar lack of understanding by the Employment
Relations Authority. Needham points to biased judgments by the ERA where the
bully is said to be more believable than the target.
For example, "He conducted himself more favourably, was
in charge of his emotions and was clear about his feelings. He did not shy
away from questions ... "
Olsen calls management's standard reaction to bullying
complaints "the shadow of collusion" that includes a code of silence.
Olsen says it's more important to remove the shadow that
allows bullying to happen than the bully.
But not everyone agrees. Waiheke High board of trustees
chairman Barnett Bond says he's read Needham's book and is not impressed.
He's concerned about the situation when an employee is not performing very
well and how employees can use "this brand-new fashionable word
'bullying"' as an escape clause".
"It's the perfect out when one is under the stress of a
disciplinary or competence process."
Willmann agrees, citing the OSH report. "There's no
finding of bullying because there wasn't," she says. "We don't
bully people. We're trying to maintain standards in as nice a way as
possible, but sometimes you have to be a bit firm. You've got to if you're going
to run a good school."
Whatever the truth about Waiheke High, something is not
right. The Herald continues to hear claims from teachers afraid to speak out
about ongoing bullying. Bond says the board has new OSH-designated procedures
in place to accept such claims but so far he's received none.
The real tragedy here is that the truth remains elusive and
that all the agencies involved remain powerless or reluctant to find it.
Dedicated teachers and employees deserve better.
|