By Thia James

Students attend talk tackling workplace bullying

Apr 10, 2013 | 4:44 PM

Students from the Saskatchewan Indian Institute of Technologies (SIIT) attended a mid-morning presentation Wednesday at the John M. Cuelenaere Library about bullying in the workplace.

The crowd of less than a hundred students wore pink shirts donated by the Northern Lights Casino, and listened as Shawn Tallmadge, the harassment officer with the Saskatchewan Government Ministries of Labour Relations and Workplace Safety. The talk coincides with the Day of Pink, an annual anti-bullying event held the second Wednesday of every April.

People don’t wake up and say they want to be a bully, he told the audience. He said everyone has a personality and people have personality clashes and some are targeted when others see a weakness.

Tallmadge said in his time dealing with harassment, he has heard of a person being pinned down by co-workers and had food shoved into places you wouldn’t expect to, and of people taped to chairs, even lit on fire. But he hasn’t had to deal with severe cases like those ones in a long time.

He gave the students an overview of the province’s harassment policy as it applies to the workplace.

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Regulations require employers to stop harassment among its employees as soon as it is uncovered, each workplace need to have a harassment policy. That policy needs to be posted and readily available.

Shannon Pettem, an instructor in business administration at SIIT said it was important to give the students a general awareness about the issue because it’s become prevalent. She said it’s also important for the students to learn about the effect of bullying on themselves and others and what to do if they are victims of or witnesses to bullying.

“I guess we decided it was a worthwhile … event,” she said. “I know that it’s often that schools are, high schools and elementary schools are involved and we wanted to expand that to post-secondary students and the workforce.”

She hopes the event gives the students a greater understanding of the issue and it empowers the students and potential employees and employers to address bullying.

Dean of student services and enrollment management Arlene Bear said this is good preparation for the secondary students, since they will be entering the workplace.

“With the various topics, they’ll take that back to their classrooms and even to their families, plus to their workplace.”

Workplace bullying involves behaviours such as exclusion, setting higher standards for a specific person, or unrealistic demands. But none of it on its own is harassment, Tallmadge said.

But repeated mistreatment of one or two employees where there’s a malicious mix and the person knows or ought to know their comments or behaviour is hurtful would make it bullying.

And bullying doesn’t just affect the person who is directly bullied. Tallmadge said it hurts friends, families and other co-workers. Family and friends suffer because the victim becomes consumed by the situation.

Statistically speaking, bullied employees waste up to 52 per cent of their time at work because of the situation, according to numbers cited by Tallmadge. The reasons for the lost time range from spending time defending themselves to missing work altogether. The lost productivity means that co-workers end up picking up the slack.

He said one in six people experience bullying at work and it’s more common than sexual harassment and verbal abuse.

Tallmadge also spoke at a luncheon held by Saskatchewan Association of Human Resources Professional at the SIIT campus in Prince Albert Wednesday afternoon.

tjames@panow.com

On Twitter: @thiajames