The Costs of Online Workplace Abuse
Recently, the musician and artist Grimes tweeted:
The tweet received 18K likes, but the replies were both supportive and toxic. Earlier this week, the cosmetics company Lush announced its decision to stop using certain social media platforms to “shield our customers from the harm and manipulation they may experience while trying to connect with us on social media”.
It should be a wake-up call that prominent users and companies are making the decision to remove themselves from important marketing channels due to their toxicity. Organizations and the platforms themselves can no longer avoid examining and addressing the toll online workplace abuse is taking.
But how can we begin to realize the real costs of digital workplace harassment? From an organization’s perspective, workplace harassment carries a number of costs, from the obvious such as litigation expenses and costs associated with employee turnover, to the more pernicious, like morale decreases and lowered productivity .
However, there’s a dearth of research quantifying these costs specifically with regards to workplace cyberbullying and online harassment. While an online presence has become a necessity for many jobs , and the increase in remote and hybrid work means that harassment can be conducted via a multitude of channels, research has been slow in studying the specific effects of digital workplace toxicity.
A 2018 Australian survey looked at the costs borne by individuals due to online harassment and cyberbullying. Of the survey respondents, 16% experienced “negative impacts on wellbeing from harassment” or “reported cyberhate”, and 4.4% had sought medical help as a result. Another 4.4% reported that their work and income had been affected. The authors estimated the costs country-wide at $267 millions (AUD) in lost income and $62 million in medical costs.
A 2020 survey of academics and scholars who had experienced online harassment related to their work found that 51% had experienced a loss of productivity as a result (62% of women respondents and 56% of men). Furthermore, the experience made 35% of respondents want to quit their job or leave their academic program.
While organizations may be most interested in how online harassment in the workplace affects their bottom line, there are external societal costs as well. We know that women who suffer abuse on social media can result in candidates choosing not to run for office again , and that watching it happen to others deters women from even trying. This in turn thwarts attempts at achieving gender parity in democratic representation, which is associated with a host of negative outcomes. And after all, politics is ultimately a job — and social media has become a critical part of the workplace for public leaders.
Ultimately, however, there is also a very real human cost. The suicides of a Spanish woman and an American woman were linked to online/digital harassment and bullying from their own co-workers, with attempts to hold their employers accountable in both cases. In the UK, reality tv presenter Caroline Flack was subject to both bullying on social media and in the traditional press, leading to speculation it contributed to her suicide.
It’s beyond time to convince organizations to take the online abuse of their employees seriously, and for governments to introduce stricter legislation for cyberbullying and digital harassment.
Learn about how your organization can solve this problem at www.aretolabs.com/probot.
Originally published at https://www.aretolabs.com on December 9, 2021.
