In this blog post we explore the topic of bullying in resource industries. This topic is of interest to us at Factive because it links into our broader work on gender in these industries. It’s also a topic that has received very little attention in the research and in organisational responses to improving workplace culture.
Our thoughts on this topic are inspired by a recent article: O’Donnell, S. & MacIntosh, J. (2015). “Gender and workplace bullying: Men’s experiences of surviving bullying at work”. Qualitative Health Research. O’Donnell and MacIntosh seek to explore the experiences of bullying among men at work. The sample of men included in their study is small; only 20 men in total. It is also very localised in that all the men who were interviewed live in Canada’s Atlantic Provinces. This study nevertheless helps to open up the debate about how men experience bullying in the workplace, and to respond to what the authors identify as a tradition of either exploring bullying only as it impacts on women at work or including the experiences of men as a way of comparing these to the experiences of women.
Their article is not industry specific; the men who participated in the study come from a range of industries. Its findings nevertheless allow us to think about how bullying might be experienced in very specific industries such as mining, oil & gas, and construction. It helps us ask a number of questions that need to be asked to explore how bullying impacts on men in these industries.
– To what extent does bullying take place in these industries?
– How do men in these industries deal with or respond to bullying?
– Are there specific reasons why men are bullied in highly masculinised workplaces, and do these reasons have anything to do with how men are expected to behave as men (or what might also be called “the policing of gender”)?
– What systems are in place for dealing with cases where men are bullied?
– Are these systems different depending on whether the bully is a man, a woman, a colleague, or a superior?
– Are these systems effective?
– What are the impacts of bullying in industries like mining on productivity, employee wellbeing, safety, and leadership?
In starting to think about this topic, we realise there’s a long way to go. Similar to when we first starting thinking about the links between safety and gender in mining, we discover that there are so many unknowns, and so much work to be done to understand this topic fully. The intention of this blog post, therefore, is to open up the conversation about men and bullying in the workplaces of resource companies. We anticipate we will come back to it at a later date.
There’s currently a lot of interest in the impacts of fly-in-fly-out (FIFO) on the personal health and well-being of workers. The FIFO model of employment is often appealing to resource companies. It enables these companies to tap into a much larger skilled labour force than is available in the local area. It can also mean the companies do not have to invest in building the community infrastructure that residential employees and their families often need and desire. In some cases, FIFO is actually the only option available, particularly if the resource operation is on an offshore oil rig or similarly extremely remote.
The current debate is, however, somewhat limiting in that it tends to emphasise how the negative impacts on FIFO workers are the result of their distance from their families. The assumption is made that FIFO workers suffer from mental health issues because they don’t have the support of family members while at work. This assumption is then reaffirmed by employees who see this as an acceptable way of rationalising their position when they are asked to describe how they feel. The “family” is often mythologised as stable and protective, and being away from this space therefore easily becomes a legitimate excuse for explaining why some FIFO employees feel unhappy or under stress. Questions about how the family space truly functions are missing in this debate. Importantly, there is also a lack of attention to how the cultures of the work environments may be causing damage to workers too. It may not simply be that FIFO employees are away from family members who might otherwise be able to provide support, but that the workplace where they are required to live for extended periods of time not only fails to provide that much-needed support, but actively causes discomfort and harm to them.
In male-dominated and highly masculinised contexts, for example, the demand to be appropriately masculine can be intense. It can take up a lot of time and energy on the part of those who are seeking to be seen as masculine enough and those who are intent on policing the masculinity of others around them. The research overwhelmingly shows that highly masculinsed cultures do not welcome or easily accommodate gender diversity. Behaviours and attitudes that are different to the established norms are discouraged and often bullied out of people. This is one of the reasons why many resource companies find it difficult to accommodate women in their workforce, as women are often instantly perceived to be insufficiently masculine and/or some women refuse to adopt what is deemed to be an appropriate masculinity so they can fit in.
An emerging idea in organisations today is the need for employees to learn how to become more “resilient”. Resilience training can focus on providing employees with skills in how to deal with difficult situations in the workplace so that these situations do not cause them stress. This kind of training is seen as a suitable response to help employees cope with stress while at work. There is a danger, however, that resilience training can offer an excuse to ignore the reasons why the difficult situations are there to begin with. Are employees expected to meet impossible demands for work production, for example? Is there a particular manager who is being unprofessional or even cruel with their staff? The demand for employee resilience too easily allows the organisation to avoid having to ask some difficult questions about its workplace culture. It also places the onus of survival on the stressed employee which is akin to saying that people who are intimidated or bullied just need to “toughen up”.
Yet, O’Donnell and MacIntosh identify that bullying at work comes in many different forms. It can be “manipulation, intimidation, humiliation, teasing, belittling, name-calling, criticism, blame, exclusion, isolation, punishment, oppression, withholding of information and resources, undermining work, credibility and reputation, removing work roles and responsibilities, altering work expectations, hampering or denying advancement, dismissal and threats of dismissal, yelling, and physical threats” (p. 3). What is particularly alarming from their study is the finding that the men who sought help from their employer to deal with the bullying all discovered that no support was available. The authors write: “There were no cases where seeking help from these sources [managers, human resource personnel etc.] resulted in workplace organizations taking appropriate steps to resolve the bullying” (p. 4). O’Donnell and MacIntosh further conclude that “speaking up resulted in negative consequences for targets, including having their integrity, reputation, and mental health questioned”. The workplace culture is, therefore, seen to be unwilling or unable to provide support to employees who are bullied. Insufficient work is being done to analyse why the workplace culture provides a space in which bullying occurs to begin with. Instead, individual men are left to deal with their experiences of bullying by themselves, and their responses can be as intense as leaving their job, severe depression, and suicidal thoughts.
One limitation of this study is that it focuses exclusively on the experiences of men who have experienced bullying. To understand why bullying occurs in the workplace, we also need to know how men who bully experience bullying. What motivates men to bully others at work? What do they perceive they gain and what do they actually gain by being a bully? Have they too experienced bullying in the workplace and, if so, how does this affect their attitude towards bullying in so much as they may not even perceive their bullying actions to be “bullying”? Are there specific kinds of people or behaviours they target, and why? A focus on the dominant entity (i.e., the bully) in this relationship of power between the bully and the bullied would bring this kind of research into line with the recent interest in exploring how the construction of dominant identities (e.g., man, white, heterosexual) function to reaffirm subordinate identities (e.g., women, black, homosexual) as “other”.
Given these preliminary ideas and thoughts on bullying in resource industries, the following are some recommendations for what resource companies can do to investigate the impacts of bullying on men in their work spaces:
1. Explore how employees understand bullying. This can be achieved through focus groups, surveys, interviews, and informal discussions in toolbox talks or similar. This provides a baseline for understanding bullying in the local workplace context, and it then becomes possible to compare the workforces understanding of bullying with what the legislation might say about bullying or about how bullying might be understood elsewhere.
2. Carry out a desktop review of relevant organisational policies which address bullying in the workplace, and consider how these can be updated to recognise gender as an important component of bullying. It may be that the organisation has no specific policies on bullying, in which case this might suggest a need to explore why bullying has been hidden or if employees who might normally be responsible for dealing with workplace issues of bullying lack the skills to do so.
3. Analyse the workplace culture to find out what kind of genders are dominant and what kinds of gender are excluded or ridiculed. (Here, the term “gender” must be seen as referring to how we behave as men and women, and not to biological sex.) This will help the organisation to explore experiences of bullying not as examples of bad people picking on victims, but rather as the outcome of a particular workplace culture that preferences specific kinds of people over others.
4. Ensure that senior managers and human resources personnel are adequately trained in how to recognise and respond to bullying, and how the responses might need to differ depending on whether the bully and the bullied are men or women. Safety professionals should also be included in this up-skilling and training, because safety and gender are recognised to be linked, and being bullied can place employees at greater risk of physical harm when at work.
If you have experienced bullying while working in a resource company or if you would like to discuss what your organisation can do to respond to bullying at work, please contact us through our website. If you have some comments or ideas about bullying in male-dominated environments, please write your comment here.