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How can we better understand the bullied at work and help them out

Ting-Chun Chen
Design Thinking
Published in
7 min readJun 20, 2022
Credit:iStock

Bullying, as defined by the American Psychological Association, is a form of aggressive behaviour in which someone intentionally and repeatedly causes another person injury or discomfort. Bullying can take the form of physical contact, words or more subtle actions. Bullying can happen in all areas of a society and to people of various age groups. As a working professional myself, I have decided to focus on bullying at the workplace since this aspect is ubiquitous yet often overlooked or neglected by the society as adults are often being considered as ‘mature enough to handle pressure from work’. Is it really ok to brush it off like this?

Like all other cases, bullying at the workplace is aggressive in nature but manifests itself in very different ways: rudeness, harassment, emotional abuse, social exclusion, abuse of supervisory power, and many more. In the workplace, the employee is constantly harassed by colleagues or his/her supervisors for a long time, and is unable to protect himself/herself against this injustice. Eventually, the victim is forced to succumb to violence.

According to a finding by Steven Mintz(Workplace Ethic Advice, 2021), 79% of working professionals have indirectly experienced or witnessed bullying at work (78% of women vs. 80% of men.) Another 66% of employees have personally become victims of workplace bullying (69% of women vs. 63% of men).

Interestingly, the majority of bullies aren’t bosses who you think would be the typical suspects. In over 50% of cases, bullying comes from coworkers, according to the survey done by Workplace Ethic Advice:

  • Coworkers — 52%
  • Direct managers — 33%
  • External managers — 8%
  • Other company employees — 6%

the effects of workplace bullying ranged from negative adverse effects such as; severe anxiety (76%), disrupted sleep (71%), loss of concentration (71%), PTSD (47%), clinical depression (39%), and panic attacks(32%)

According to Forbes, 75% of employees reported being affected as either a target or witness of bullying in 2018. In 2019, the figure has gone up to 94%! The increase of 19% serves as a clear indication that the prevalence and extent of workplace bullying has worsened and it requires serious and immediate action.

Now we have the Problem statement — How can we better understand the bullied at work and help them out?

So is this a good Problem to solve with Design Thinking? Let’s start with empathy.

Credit:iStock

According to an article from Interaction Design Foundation (June, 2021) Empathy is our ability to see the world through other people’s eyes — to see what they see, feel what they feel and experience things as they do. Of course, none of us can fully experience things the way someone else does, but we can attempt to get as close to this as possible. We achieve this empathic state as we put aside our own preconceived ideas about the world and choose to understand the ideas, thoughts and needs of others instead.

IDEO’s Human-Centered Design Toolkit explains further that empathising with the people you’re designing for is the best route to truly grasping the context and complexities of their lives. But most importantly, it keeps the people you’re designing for squarely grounded in the centre of your work.

In order to better grasp the world experienced by those who are bullied at work, I had a short interview with a young lady who fell victim to workplace bullying. For the sake of anonymity, the name of the interviewee and her abuser will be undisclosed:

I remember it being my first job working as a junior personal assistant in a multinational . After working here for less than a week, there was a Miss.W (the bully) who seemed to be upset with me. she started to pick on the way I dressed, saying how awful my hair and shoes looked. I was naive enough to ignore the sign and move on. All I wanted at that time was to pass the probation.

Things got worse in the three months after I started, I was scolded and reproached every day. No one in the office was willing to stand up for me. In fact, I was completely ignored. When I ask them for advice at work, I always get responses such as: “I haven’t got a chance to look at it! I don’t know, you might want to ask Miss.W.”

However, something happened three days before the end of my probation which was a rude awakening for me. It wasn’t that I was stupid or being incompetent, it was Miss.W who was making things difficult all the time and everyone in the department just chose to ignore me! When I presented the prepared report to Miss.W, she just violently threw the report at my head and yelled at me at the top of her lungs: “You’ve got to be kidding me! I’d never thought you’d be this stupid! Have you checked it before handing it to me? Now go back to fix it properly!” At that time, I silently went back to the position and made up my mind that enough was enough!

When the HR knew that I was going to resign, she seemed to have seen it miles away and she spoke to me in a rather matter-of-fact tone: “In the workplace, you have to learn to be more patient than you were as a student and the contract you signed at the beginning indicating the level of your position as the supervisor. It is very inappropriate and immature of you to suddenly quit your job. You are no longer a student, you should not be so self-willed.” Like I had expected, not a single word on Miss W’s abusive behaviour.

After quitting this job, I settled for nearly half a year before I started looking for the next job, and I did not put this work experience into my resume, because the three months of working there had brought me too much negativities. I didn’t even know how I could explain it when being asked by the interviewer and at the time I didn’t know if I was ready to go back to work again.

The input above allow me to gain a better understanding of the perspectives of the bullied and I categorise them into the empathy map below.

Template Credit: Mural

Now the questions come to “How Might We” reach out to these people and help them

  1. How might we reach as many target audiences as possible?
  • Through social media, forums, friends, colleagues/ex-colleagues

2. How might we access and collect their feedback in an efficient manner?

  • Through online surveys such as google forms, survey monkey….etc.
  • We let the audience be aware of the deadline for the survey collection

3. How might we let people feel safe in answering our questions?

  • In order to conform to anonymity, no personal infos such as emails, names, addresses….etc will need to be provided during the process.

4. How might we design the questions which best adhere to the situation?

  • We refer to the survey guidance set by surveymonkey.
  • We also make reference to Ditch the Label, one of the UK’s leading youth charities when forming demographic questions.

After a group brainstorming session based on the “How Might We” method, we are able to come up a design for the anonymous survey:

https://forms.gle/VpJRsm6etCnuqMwP6

The survey has been distributed to our target audience (people at work) via various channels and the collection of data is updated on a regular basis. We will use the statistical results derived from survey responses in our final group project to design the end product to fight bullying at the workplace.

Reference:

Design Thinking
Bullying
Workplace Culture
Human Centered Design
Workplace

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Ting-Chun Chen
Design Thinking

Written by Ting-Chun Chen

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