Hey Sweeties,
Here’s the deal: sometime in your life, maybe once, maybe more than once, you’ll meet someone that with very little effort manages to crush you and make you feel like shit. Ordinarily, I would liken this behaviour to the bully everybody encountered or knew of at school. While I do not excuse the poor behaviour of anyone at school, that was school and once out in the real world those bullies have zero power, and any friends that turned into shitheads you could drop in an instant. However, when a workplace crushes the life out of everything you have worked for, that is different.
On Tuesday 2nd January I handed in my notice and by 10:30am I had left the building and was driving home. Two days into 2018 and I had voluntarily put myself on notice and into unemployment. I had been in this particular role less than three months.
Bullying in the Workplace | Why I Handed in my Notice without a Plan
Okay firstly, I do 100% not condone ever resigning from a job without a plan to take over and fall back on. I also acknowledge that being able to resign without another job to go to, or savings in place to cover a period of unemployment, is most definitely a privilege and not an option many people can take advantage of. I will always be eternally grateful for the support of my husband during this time.
So what happened?
To date, whenever I have become miserable and/or bored in my job I recognise that it is time to move on and will take the necessary action to find another role and leave only when something has been secured. However, in this situation whereby I was experiencing bullying in the workplace, hanging on was genuinely not an option if I wanted to keep my (mental) health in tact, and it was for this reason I had to leave ASAP.
When it comes to professionalism and your career, it’s very frustrating that you have to conform to a certain conduct when discussing things that have gone wrong, when really all you want to do is write a list of everything the twat(s) put you through. However, my experience can still be beautifully summed up in one, powerful word: bullying.
Bullying in the Workplace
When you experience bullying at school, you tell your parents, who tell you to tell the teacher, who then pulls the bully out of class and calls his/her parents. You are then closely watched to ensure you are left alone and supported by your friends. When you experience bullying in the workplace, you tell your line manager and HR, who between them put a plan in place; have a word with the bully’s manager; and you probably all thrash out your differences in a meeting and move on. That’s what should happen. In my particular case, because the individual I was having issues with was my manager, I had to go directly to HR but I did also speak to my manager’s manager, to ensure nothing was being done secretly and we were all clear on what -for me- was going wrong. A meeting to thrash out our differences was organised which I felt went okay, and even though over the coming few days and weeks I could identify from time to time that the individual was putting into practice some tips learnt in management training, fundamentally nothing was improving. In fact, it was getting worse. I then found myself in a horrible, anxiety driven cycle of:
A thirty-year old professional reduced to tears and panic attacks
As a result of this experience, amongst other things, I now fear offices because my manager would call me in to her office every single morning, and often at other times during the day, and the experience while in there was rarely good. For me I liken the experience to the telephone, I hate phone calls at the best of times and I can spend ages psyching myself up to call someone (new), and it’s the same for having to make myself get up and walk to someone’s office (it’s something to do with obstacles when it comes to communication). The day before I completely broke down and hit my lowest (and ultimately what I couldn’t come back from), I even blurted out to my manager that I hated her office because I associated it with bad experiences. It was just shrugged off.
Until working at this particular place, my anxiety had rarely ever affected me in the workplace. If I had a bad anxiety fuelled day before this, it was something outside that was influencing me and not something actually at work. Here, I was an anxious wreck because of this one individual, and trying to keep it under control was hell because every day I came into work not knowing what the next eight hours were going to bring, making it impossible to never not be worrying. The more I tried to explain about how I was feeling, and things that could be done to help me, the more it was having an opposite effect.
Patience is a key thing, if you have triggered a negative experience within me (or anyone), time and space is needed to heal and it kind of needs to be on an anxiety sufferer’s terms for how and when they can build some confidence again to be around you. This individual couldn’t grasp this. While she made a weak effort to be patient and ask me to lead on ideas and ways on how our relationship could improve and work, she also pushed me too hard and too soon repeatedly. Monday she would be understanding, Wednesday she’s annoyed. I know mental health awareness in the workplace still has a long, long way to go, but managers particularly really need to take it upon themselves to understand mental health and common trigger points in the workplace, and methods in which to help.
My biggest grievance was that I was a thirty-year-old professional woman being reduced to tears and panic attacks on a near daily basis. I had managed to manoeuvre myself into a position working at the right level, on a great salary in what I thought was a great company with plenty of future opportunity, and actually it was just a nightmare. So I had a choice, either I stayed or I would have to leave. Of course we all know the outcome of this story but I don’t think anyone actually expected me to resign. It took a breakdown in the office for people to finally wake up and take notice of how serious this bullying in the workplace situation actually was… but by then it was too late. I took some time off over Christmas and basically never went back.
Why it’s important to tell my story
For many this post will be considered unprofessional but why are we so scared to tell the truth? As it currently stands, in employment law you haven’t got a leg to stand on if you have been with an employer less than two years. I am not a member of any union because to be honest, I never thought I would need to, and from what I can tell, the company in question have taken no further steps to discipline the individual. The bully kept her job and I had to leave mine. How honesty, is that okay?
Fortunately, even though things were a bit tight for a while, I did some temping and I have since secured myself a new permanent role and 2018 is back on track (read my post about how to get back to you after a negative experience, here). Having January off was actually what I needed and was a great opportunity to take some time out for myself; I’ve also since come to reflect on lessons learnt when you experience a job mistake, you can read that post here.
Have you ever experienced bullying in the workplace? How did it get resolved?
Until next time x
