Workplace bullying in the #MeToo era

CHRIS HATZIS
Eavesdrop on Experts, a podcast about stories of inspiration and insights. It’s where expert types obsess, confess and profess. I’m Chris Hatzis, let’s eavesdrop on experts changing the world - one lecture, one experiment, one interview at a time.

Workplace bullying. Chances are we've all seen or experienced it at least once in our lives. A range of behaviours can make us feel powerless at work - from eye-rolls and being ignored in meetings, to physical harassment. It could happen for a number of reasons, but the most likely culprit is a power imbalance. And it doesn't just come from the office - these behavioural patterns stem all the way back to childhood.

Dr Victor Sojo is a Lecturer and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Workplace Leadership in the Department of Management and Marketing, Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Melbourne. Victor chatted to our reporter Louise Bennet about understanding, identifying, and curbing these workplace bullying behaviours in the era of #MeToo

LOUISE BENNET
Welcome to the University of Melbourne studio. It's so lovely to have you here.

VICTOR SOJO
It's great to be here.

LOUISE BENNET
Tell me, who are you and what are you known for?

VICTOR SOJO
I am Victor Sojo. I am a researcher here at the University of Melbourne. I do research about two things mainly, about leadership and how people think about leaders, lay people think about leaders, and also about abuse at work.

LOUISE BENNET
That's a nice concise area of study. It seems very concise in your answer but a very broad area of study as well.

VICTOR SOJO
Correct.

LOUISE BENNET
What made you interested in that area?

VICTOR SOJO
Well, I've always been interested in leadership because we all are embedded in environments where there are leaders, and sometimes they are very positive and drive a lot of important changes and sometimes they are quite destructive. That's probably why I also started doing research about abuse at work because sometimes the abuse is actually coming from those in positions of power and authority, from leaders. Basically, it literally was just from my own personal experiences that made me interested in understanding what are the sources of these very negative behaviours at work.

LOUISE BENNET
Tell me then, when you say your personal observations, are these negative observations?

VICTOR SOJO
Yeah. I've been lucky enough to have very good bosses throughout my life, so people who were quite inspiring and really hard working as well, so they taught me a lot about how to be a good professional. At the same time, all the way from the media to my parents to all the bosses that I have also had, from sport activities that I've taken part of, I've also seen bosses that have been very destructive, people who don't know how to set the tone of appropriate behaviour at work, or who are so concerned with performance that they forget that it's also important to take care of people and how they are feeling and that that could actually be really good for performance in the long run.

So, I have had both experiences throughout my life, but obviously the negative ones, they stick with you. They actually do teach you a lot about what kind of life you want to live and what kind of things you want to see in the world or don't want to see in the world.

LOUISE BENNET
I really want to ask a pertinent question here. How negative have the negative experiences that you've seen or the negative observations that have affected people in the workplace, how far does that go?

VICTOR SOJO
Yeah, that's a great question. I think it's interesting because in our research we typically try to organise all of these negative experiences in terms of intensity and frequency. Some experiences are quite intense and we talk about intensity in relation to the capacity of the experience to cause immediate physical or psychological trauma. Some of the experiences at work are of that nature. We're talking about literally physical abuse at work, like people punching you, all the way to sexual assault at work.

That's one of the key areas that I do research about. Even though those experiences are - they have a very low frequency because socially we all know that that's not acceptable and some of that is criminal behaviour as well, so people know that they shouldn't do it, even though they are less frequent, they do happen and when they happen they have a large negative impact on people both inside and outside work.

But we also do research on the other end of the continuum. Basically, we do research about experiences that are more common, they happen more frequently, like sexist comments or sexist jokes or racist comments and jokes. Or people - literally, you're in a meeting talking to somebody and they roll their eyes or they don't look at you to your face when you are talking to them. All of those things are on the other end of the extreme, so they won't cause psychological harm immediately, so they won't cause psychological trauma immediately, or physical.

But if you're exposed to this on a daily basis, you could imagine how it becomes what we call an everyday hassle, and plenty of research about this, how everyday hassles actually in the long run have a very large negative impact on people's physical, psychological health, on their social functioning. People [unclear] their self-efficacy, for instance, typically suffer when people undermine you on a daily basis at work. So, we try to explore the whole continuum of this negative behaviour at work and try to identify the different factors that are predictors of all of this negative behaviour.

LOUISE BENNET
I imagine then that the more extreme behaviours that cause trauma, immediate trauma at work, probably are less frequent than the ones that are a lot more subtle.

VICTOR SOJO
Correct.

LOUISE BENNET
You mentioned this in one of your papers and you called it low-intensity deviant behaviours.

VICTOR SOJO
Correct.

LOUISE BENNET
Can I assume then that that is then quite common?

VICTOR SOJO
Yes. For instance, in our own empirical research I've done here at the university and that's what we have seen through meta-analysis and other people's work, this low-intensity deviant behaviour, they're things like I don't look at you when I'm talking to you or I roll my eyes when you're telling me something, or I start talking about you behind your back, and again, sometimes I make jokes about you.

All of these behaviours, one of the key problems with this behaviour is that it's very hard to call out, because we're talking about actions that are kind of sitting on the fence, so it is hard for me to understand the intention behind that. As a person, I will be sitting here wondering am I imagining this or actually, this person is just actively trying to be mean or actively trying to undermine me.

The fact that that behaviour is in that sort of grey area means a number of things. One of them is super-hard to call out because I don't understand the intention, it means then that the rules about how appropriate or inappropriate it is are also unclear to a lot of people. The fact that the rules are unclear, that I cannot call it out means that it could go on forever, and impossible to actually manage it.

Also, when you do it and other people see you doing it and nobody calls it out, then we all learn that that behaviour is appropriate in this environment. You could create a system where either two people engage in that sort of behaviour all the time against each other, or an entire team of people end up thinking that this is exactly how the world should operate, this is a normal way of behaving at work. Again, the research is very clear about this. There is plenty of evidence that this is the kind of behaviour that will lead to very negative, both personal and occupational consequences for the people who experience them. So, it is a pretty complex situation here.

LOUISE BENNET
I can imagine that calling it out would then also be very difficult, not just because it's not specific or it's hard to be clear, it's a grey area, but also because the people that you would go to call out that sort of behaviour would probably be happy to dismiss it.

VICTOR SOJO
Correct.

LOUISE BENNET
Because it would mean then they would have to - if they didn’t dismiss it, it's a lot more work for them.

VICTOR SOJO
Correct.

LOUISE BENNET
It's hard to prove.

VICTOR SOJO
Yeah, or they don't understand it. You are literally trying to articulate to them why this is a problem for you but because maybe these people that you are trying to talk to, they actually do it all the time, they don't see it as a problem. This is one of these areas where we're connecting with leadership. Basically, if your boss doesn’t understand that this behaviour is problematic, that it leads to negative consequences outside and inside work and if they are not able to have the language to really put a concept and articulate exactly what it is that you're talking about, they will dismiss it. It won't be relevant. Obviously, if that's the situation they won't do anything about it. They wouldn't even know where to start.

Actually, that's one of the key areas that we're working on. Coming from these papers that we've been talking about before, we actually developed a training program for managers to really give them an understanding of the range of behaviours that we're talking about, what are the key predictors of this behaviour and how to prevent it at work, but mainly literally just to help them understand that these behaviours do exist and that they do lead to negative consequences, because otherwise when people try to go to them and talk about these issues, they will dismiss it straightaway.

LOUISE BENNET
You said that there are many negative consequences. You said stress and it builds up over time. What are the actual ways that those negative consequences can manifest themselves?

VICTOR SOJO
Yeah, that's a great question. There are many. In a more immediate way, it will manifest on negative evaluation of your co-workers, of your supervisor, even of the task that you're doing on a daily basis. Basically, if we're in this environment and I'm experiencing negative social interactions, it becomes very hard for me to actually work effectively with you because all I'm going to be - well, I'm going to be feeling all this range of negative reactions, which typically leads to withdrawal behaviour.

So, in the most immediate sense, you will have people feeling quite negative - a range of quite negative emotions towards their environment and the people in it. It will hinder people's performance because you cannot work effectively with others that you feel are mistreating you. Obviously, in the long run this could lead to anxiety and depression; plenty of research about that. Ultimately, it could lead to people wanting to leave the organisation that they are working for and obviously, if other people in the team are learning that this behaviour is allowed, well, it could create an entirely toxic environment with high rotation, high turnover of employees and also very negative outcomes in terms of productivity.

LOUISE BENNET
You talk about the person, the victim perhaps calling it out, but what do you think the situation is with colleagues? Do you think people see it? Do you think that they become immune to it? Do you think that they do see it but they're protecting themselves? Do you think that other colleagues have a responsibility to call it more than they do?

VICTOR SOJO
Yeah. What we have seen from research is the full range. Some colleagues don't see it, literally. If they haven't ever been the target of such a behaviour or somebody they care about or they know, they really don't see it, and this is one of the problems. People start making what we call internal attributions, so basically because I don't see it, my explanation of your complaint is that you are a troublemaker, again using air quotes.

That's one - there's definitely that, people who don't see it. For instance, our research has shown that when you compare managers in organisations, managers versus subordinates and you ask them how common is this in the work environment, managers typically say this isn't happening. Whereas their employees, they say no, no, no, this is a problem, within the same organisation.

So, the question is how is this even possible, and there are many explanations. One of them is that if you're going to be mean or rude to other people, you might not do it in front of your boss because you know that they have power and that they could intervene and call you out or penalise you for that, and so you might be doing behind - somewhere else where they don't really see you. Sometimes this blind spot that we're talking about where people don't see that this is actually happening is because it really is happening behind their backs, so that's possible. That's one element of it.

Another element of it is people being motivated to not see because when you see it and you acknowledge it, then you have the responsibility to do something about it. In this same situation with the managers, we need to acknowledge that managers might have the motivation to pretend that this isn't happening, at least for two reasons: too much work, they will actually have to act on it; and reputation.

So, you need to be - most managers are concerned about the image of their organisation so if I acknowledge this, well, this is something that happens here, and people are so - we are so caught up into this whole complexity, we don't have any good tools on how to manage it, that people would rather avoid at all having the brand of their organisation attached to any of these sort of concepts because they are too toxic. All of that is happening within organisations. At the same time, you have colleagues who do notice it, they see it.

So, there many things could happen but typically there are two things that happen. One of them is I see it, I feel anxious about it, I have no idea what to say or what to do. I haven't received the training in my personal life, like literally training in the classic psychological conception of training which is - understanding of training which is that I haven't had the experience, I don't know what to do here. They freeze, and they walk out of the situation feeling super-anxious, feeling ashamed because they saw that somebody else was being mistreated and they couldn't do anything about it, and that's it. Most of the time these are the kind of colleagues who will come to you later on and will say oh my god, I'm so sorry that this happened to you, l noticed it, and look for support, look for further support, talk to your boss but they could not intervene.

There are also people who do know what to do in those situations and they call it out when they see it. This is some of the work that I've been doing, some of the work that organisations like VicHealth has been doing, the Victorian Women's Health Association have been doing this, which is to actually provide training on what we call bystander intervention, literally teaching people about the range of behaviour, what's their meaning, what are the consequences and then how to effectively intervene in that situation without losing control of the situation, without letting it get out of control and escalate.

LOUISE BENNET
That's an interesting point because I guess it brings up that next question that many people would ask is - how then do you not become frozen with political correctness? How do you get the tools when it's such a minefield when there are so many different things, when people have so many different gauges and opinions on what's acceptable and what's not, how do you get those tools to be able to draw the line and not just end up in an automaton environment?

VICTOR SOJO
Yeah. That's a great question. One of the things that we try to do when we work with organisations is to - basically negative behaviours, they compete with positive behaviour. We basically have a limited amount of time and space in our life to do a number of things, so if you learn positive behaviours to interact with each other that are effective that allow for you to get really outcomes, the probability that you will engage in all of these negatives interactions is lower. So, what we try to do instead of actually being massively concerned with trying to police the negative behaviour, is that we actually try to teach people effective way of communicating with each other, effective way of solving problems and negotiating situations that are complex and provide people with tools to understand that too.

I think that's a more effective way to manage, particularly within organisations, where we - obviously we care about people's wellbeing but we also care about people being productive and getting the job done, and so if you struggle solving problems they have to do - it happens all the time. We're having a discussion that is conceptual about the issue, the task at hand and it gets personal, and it gets personal because people don't know how to better argue their point. So, literally teaching people how to articulate exactly what they mean, with the right words, how to give proper feedback, for instance, is one thing that we actually do work a lot on, because when you give poor feedback, that typically creates a negative impression and people retaliate in a way.

Basically, what I'm trying to say here is that there is a range of very positive behaviours that are good for social interaction and good for task performance that we could teach people. We are talking about problem-solving, negotiation, how to give proper feedback, how to actively listen to understand what other people have to say, and all of these things will reduce the likelihood of misunderstanding in the communication that we have with each other. This will definitely help with situations of low-intensity deviant behaviour, where it is mainly around misunderstanding.

Now, if we talk about other aspects of negative behaviour such as racist comment or sexist comment, we need to engage in another level of intervention because in that case we need to work on empathy, in people understanding the negative impact of their behaviour on others, but also, particularly within organisations, is about values. Basically, most organisations worldwide will have a set of values that people are meant to aspire to live up to within an organisation.

So, what we tried to do in terms of racism and sexism and this sort of [lie], abuse that has to do with people's identities, basically, is that we tried to connect with what are these important values within the organisation and how making sexist comments or sexist jokes or discriminating against specific groups actually don’t match the values of the organisation. Again, what we're trying to do here is basically articulating to people their behaviours that will allow them to live up to those values and typically, those behaviours have to do with being respectful and being responsible about the job that you have to do or with being objective or with being accurate.

All of those things compete with racism and sexism and xenophobia and ableism or ageism as well. The point is that depending on the kind of abuse that we're talking about, there is a range of tools there where you could actually work on positive behaviour as opposed to having to always focus on policing the negative stuff that people are doing.

LOUISE BENNET
Well, that's a very good segue for me into #MeToo, because you've written about #MeToo as well, and I can see how this relates. How do you see how it all relates together?

VICTOR SOJO
To me, they are intimately related. The #MeToo phenomenon is so complex because you need to understand there are multiple levels of analysis. In the research that you just mentioned that we've been writing about, we try to understand it from a public health point of view. Basically, it is so pervasive that it has become an everyday hassle for a number of people so it is at a community level stressful event. That is something that we need to understand in terms of the implications of that behaviour, but as I said before, we are very much interested in prevention.

From that point of view, we need to look at what are the drivers of the sexual abuse that women experience at work, which is what the #MeToo movement is about, and so there are many drivers of that. At the most basic level, it is the sexual objectification of women, the fact that unfortunately in many countries we still have the belief that women are objects, women are not considered as humans as men are, and so we need to work on that. Every time that we focus too much on women's physical appearance, every time that we dismiss what women have to say because of how they are dressed or because of the tone of their voice and so on, and so all of these small elements actually help to reinforce that idea that women - we're allowed to devalue women, women in society. That's one element of it.

Then we have the issue of where is it that people learn all of these attitudes or values, and that starts at home when parents are making decisions about who is going to be engaging in which kind of activities, when we start talking to both our girls and boys and our intersex children what roles they are meant to be playing in society, so literally that's happening at home. We know that we have an issue at schools with the way teachers interact also with boys and girls and how they are reinforcing that separation between them.

Basically, what we're talking about is an issue that is multilayered, that definitely starts with the devaluation of women and that then is reinforced by a number of social structures. The fact that we don't have enough women in positions of power means that for a lot of men it is actually - they find it hard to see women as equal or women as people who could be in positions of power and make effective decisions about important issues, and that means that then it becomes very easy for you to devalue them whenever you're interacting with them.

Obviously also in work environments, one of the key problems that we have is hyper-competition. Basically, if we're in a system of reward where you have to perform at all cost and bring money in at all cost and be productive and profitable at all cost, it means that it is very easy for you to start using very negative tools to achieve that. For instance, gender harassment, which is a specific kind of sexual harassment in which you devalue women is not about sexual attraction, it is literally about devaluing women, about being hostile toward women. That is more common when men and women are competing for the same resources or positions within an organisation.

Basically, a winner-takes-all system of rewards within organisations, where those who are performing well get disproportionate rewards for their performance, could actually be driving a lot of the abuse that women are experiencing at work. So, what we need to understand here is that there are a number of social factors that are actually having a massive impact on these sort of behaviours that are happening at work, but then there are also specific organisational structures and systems that are actually facilitating for this abuse to take place.

LOUISE BENNET
So, what do we do about that?

VICTOR SOJO
Well, again, we have a massive range of actions that we could do about that. From my point of view, because that's also one of my areas of research, we actually do need more women in positions of power, for many reasons. We need more women in positions of power because when women are in positions of power they actually create legislation and policy that protects other women. The same way that men have been creating policies and structures that actually do protect men, whether we did it intentionally or not, that's what we did.

We need more women in positions of power so that they could actually have a voice about how we are going to manage the situation. This is very important, because right now, I'm a guy talking about this, and there are a number of women who actually have a number of solutions there. So, if we have more women in positions of power they get to have their voice heard and actually create rules about how to manage the situation, so that's one thing.

The other thing which goes at that next level in terms of social attitudes, it is that when we see more women in positions of power, we actually start understanding that women are able to think in a complex way to make important decisions, to make moral decisions, and that's super-important, and no kidding there is actually research about that.

It might sound pretty weird what I'm saying here but there is research about how people evaluate women once they see more women in positions of power, and in those situations people actually learn that women are equally competent as men and that they also have the capacity to make very complex moral decisions, whereas in a general basis people actually evaluate women lower in those competencies, if you like. So, this will be a starting point and is not trivial at all.

Obviously, another starting point is at the most basic level within organisations people need to make rules clear about what behaviour is acceptable and what behaviour is not acceptable. That's very clear so you could do it in the induction process, you could do it when you're advertising the job, you could actually declare what are the expected behaviours of people within my organisation.

In many organisations you're meant to be meeting with your manager at least once a month in a one-on-one situation where the manager is asking you how are you going, is everything working for you, where you are meant to correctly use that space to talk to people about how you're interacting with other people and if you have any comments from anybody about inappropriate behaviour from an employee, it doesn’t have to come down to a formal complaint about abuse.

It could just be that conversation where you actually say hey, people have mentioned that you've been doing this and this and that, what do you have to say about it, how useful did you think behaving like that could be in this environment, how do you think other people are feeling, so you could also do that. You could put it in performance evaluations, so at the end of the year when you're doing a formal performance assessment you could actually go and articulate what are the behaviours that you expect people to perform in a work environment, and if this person has been engaging in things that are counterproductive you could call it out there.

So, there is a range of things. The bystander intervention that we talked about earlier during the interview, that is a very effective mechanism. It doesn’t rely on a formal complaint process, it is just a colleague who feels now in the capacity to tell you why that behaviour is not appropriate. Obviously, I think compliance and regulation is crucial here, but for a range of the behaviours that we're talking about, having more people around you who could actually call it out straight away as opposed to letting the whole situation escalate. If you call it out straightaway, that is a much more effective way for everybody to save face, too, as opposed to getting into an unworkable situation where people will lose their jobs.

LOUISE BENNET
Is that what you think perhaps #MeToo is? If a child came up to you and asked you to explain #MeToo to them, what would you say?

VICTOR SOJO
Yeah. Well, at the most basic level, I would tell the child that #MeToo is a movement to explain to other people who haven't been paying attention the kind of abuse that women have been experiencing. At the most basic level I feel that that's what it was about. Basically, for women to see each other eye to eye and say you're not alone, you're not the first person to experience this, this is happening to a lot of us. But then when you are not a woman, from my point of view, it is about me understand what's the experiences that women - what is the nature of the experience that women are having, that it could be like a massive blind spot for me.

Nowadays it is becoming many more things. It is becoming a political movement, and political in the sense of showing concern for the community movement, okay, not political in terms of political parties. It's actually - that's exactly what's going to be hopefully powerful about the #MeToo movement, if it becomes a force for people to recognise how important it is to actually show respect for each other and treat people with consideration.

LOUISE BENNET
Do you think then that that sort of movement needs to come into play when it comes to this - I'm looking at your words again - covert and indirect forms of victimisation in the workplace?

VICTOR SOJO
Absolutely. Absolutely. I think - this is the thing, right. It is helping many organisations to actually say okay, I need to talk about this because it is a problem and so if we started the conversation we could go from people having some pretty basic, if you like, understanding of some notions and eventually, people will actually start developing the language, developing their understanding and capacity to have a nuanced, granular discussion about this. In my fantasy world, that's what I expect to see happening in many organisations. Unfortunately, we are not seeing that everywhere. In many organisations we still see people who - well, literally, in many organisations this conversation is not happening. It's just not happening. People are so afraid.

LOUISE BENNET
In many or the majority?

VICTOR SOJO
Oh. Well, I wouldn't know if it is the majority of the organisations but in many this isn't happening, so people either are again too afraid of the reputation of their organisation or the abuse is so pervasive in that environment that people are having different conversations. Literally, a week ago or so there was this article in Bloomberg about the #MeToo movement and Wall Street, and it was terrifying to read it because one of the key things that they were saying is that now these men working on Wall Street were arguing that they shouldn't meet with women, they shouldn't hire women, they shouldn't promote women, they shouldn't have women around them at all, they should never meet with a woman. You should never meet with a woman with closed doors because then you could be accused of sexual harassment.

So, my question is, what are you doing? Literally, what is it that you do in this environment that you reckon that just by being next to a woman you're going to be accused of sexual harassment? So you must be doing something quite terrible for that to be a real concern, but obviously this is backlash. This is literally people who don't want to change, who don't want to acknowledge that part of the discussion that we're having is also about people saying I have enough social support to ask for respect that now I expect from and they're deciding not to acknowledge the fact that they need to treat women with respect.

Obviously, all that was described in the article in the US is illegal; we're talking about workplace discrimination, everything that was articulated there and that's very interesting too, that these people who were willing to make those comments for some reason they didn’t understand that what they were describing and recommending to do or saying that they would do is actually called workplace discrimination, which is not legal.

LOUISE BENNET
Do you think the #MeToo movement is all positive? What do you think about the fact that things are growing but then there's also flak that the #MeToo movement attracts. You mentioned Bloomberg before and perhaps the desire for men, some men to not have anything to do with women for fear of repercussions. Do you think it's all good?

VICTOR SOJO
That's a great question. My view is that change will always generate backlash. When you think about the civil rights movement in the US, it wasn’t pretty at all but it had to be done. When you think about apartheid in South Africa and the struggle to eliminate that - well, we haven't entirely eliminated it, in fact. The point I'm trying to make here is that always when we are moving towards more progress, towards a specific group of people within society being recognised as fully humans who are meant to have the same civil rights and the same level of respect, you will always get people who will push back. Because unfortunately, some people think that civil rights are pie, so if some people get some of the pie, others won't be able to get any of it. It is not the case, but that's sort of how these rights in society have been construed.

So, I think it is very positive. I think it is super-important for people who have been feeling marginalised and disrespected and abused to speak up and to find a million ways to articulate that. That's what we have seen with the #MeToo movement. It is not a single movement. We have a million of different voices coming out and articulating their experience. I couldn't think of anything better than that, particularly when we're talking about marginalised groups, but we are definitely seeing some negative consequences.

The fact that we are seeing a lot of backlash from both men and women, people who first of all don't want to have anything to do with this movement because they think it is too toxic, also people just literally pushing back. So, things like men's rights groups, so these men who now think that their rights are being somehow affected by the fact that other people are also considered humans and equals, that's not new. Socially, when you look [around] the history of humankind, that's not new. That is backlash.

What we need to do is to - which is something beautiful that VicHealth has done, which is to actually articulate to people the range of behaviours that you will see when people are pushing back so that we understand what backlash looks like, and also the range of things that we could do to deal with that backlash so that we understand that there are some people out there that are so polarised that spending all of our energy trying to make them understand what we're talking about, it could be futile. But the large majority of humans actually they are fairly open to listen to what you have to say, and so we need to identify who are the group of people who are willing to listen, to understand, to change their attitude, and we need to work very hard with them.

And obviously, a big part of the problem that we're seeing is the people who are just shutting down, so they don't want to talk about it, they don't want to engage, they don't want to have anything to do with it because that leaves you with no room to actually intervene. What I think would be a very interesting research question for us to identify what predicts that, basically what predicts the fact that some people don't want to have anything to do with it because that doesn’t leave you any room for change.

LOUISE BENNET
It's such a clear, clean issue in so many ways because it is so pertinent to everyone's life. There are very few people on the planet that aren't in some way affected by these things, both either sexually or in the workplace, and yet it is so insidious and difficult to put your finger on and work out how to actually come to a solution. If you were to give one piece of advice to people on how to combat this sort of bullying, this sort of victimisation, both sexual and in the workplace, what would you say?

VICTOR SOJO
That's an interesting question. My first answer will be there is no silver bullet, but the question that you just asked me is exactly the question that every single partner organisation that I work with asks me. Everybody wants this unique solution that is going to solve everything in the world. For organisations, I think the key thing is define what positive, respectful behaviour is meant to look like within your organisation and then start reinforcing that with the way you pay, with the way you promote people.

Basically, we do - so people do whatever is being reinforced, with bonuses, with promotions, with praise, we do that. So, at the most basic level at least try to identify what respect looks like in this environment, and let's actually start paying people for showing that respect. That would be one starting point, but definitely by no means they are the only things that we should do to work this out.

LOUISE BENNET
What do you say to people that say “get over it”, or “harden up”, or “get a thicker skin”, or “don't dwell on the negative”?

VICTOR SOJO
Yeah. A lot of the work that we do is literally on educating employees so that they understand that this idea of well actually, they are hardening up. Whenever you find yourself in a situation where you want to tell other people toughen up, remember, you don't know the full extent of everybody else's experiences in life, and so they probably have already toughened up a lot because they are coping with a massive range of very difficult situations. So, think twice before you - that's what I would tell to somebody who is willing to say such a thing, stop there, think twice before speaking up because probably this person has been coping with a lot of difficult stuff and they are actually pretty tough, but it does get to you in the long run.

LOUISE BENNET
Thank you so much for speaking to me today, Victor. It's been really delightful and hopefully there's a light at the end of this tunnel that we've been talking about. Just to finish this off, next time someone says they're being victimised, what would you like people to think?

VICTOR SOJO
Well, I think I want people to empathise with them, to actually make an effort to put themselves in the situation of the person who is talking to them and to listen. Sometimes people just want to be heard.

LOUISE BENNET
Victor Sojo, thank you so much for being with me.

VICTOR SOJO
Thank you for having me.

CHRIS HATZIS
Thank you to Dr. Victor Sojo, Lecturer in Leadership and Research Fellow at the Centre for Workplace Leadership in the Department of Management and Marketing, Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Melbourne. And thanks to our reporter Louise Bennet.

Eavesdrop on Experts - stories of inspiration and insights - was made possible by the University of Melbourne. This episode was recorded on December 21, 2018. You’ll find a full transcript on the Pursuit website. Audio engineering by me, Chris Hatzis. Co-production - Silvi Vann-Wall and Dr Andi Horvath. Eavesdrop on Experts is licensed under Creative Commons, Copyright 2019, The University of Melbourne. Don’t forget to drop us a review on iTunes, and check out the rest of the Eavesdrop episodes in our archive. I’m Chris Hatzis, producer and editor. Join us again next time for another Eavesdrop on Experts.