Bully in the Office
By Joy D. Russell
VARBusiness
For Architects of the Digital Economy
February 24, 2001

LAST MONTH, William Baker carries a golf bag loaded with firearms into the Navistar engine plant in Melrose Park, Ill. The terminated employee then shoots four people to death, wounds four others, then fatally shoots himself. Baker was to begin a federal prison term the next day for helping steal engines and parts from the plant, police say.

In December 2000, Michael McDermott, a software engineer at Edgewater Technology, selects and shoots co-workers in his Wakefield, Mass., office. Seven people die. Employers at the Internet solution provider had recently told McDermott that wages would be garnished from his paycheck to pay the IRS for back taxes.

In November 1998, Frank Lemos, an equipment operator at a Nevada chemical plant, uses the bucket of a 100-ton loader to crush to death his production supervisor, a man he had worked under for more than 30 years. Several years before the incident, the supervisor denied Lemos' worker's compensation claim.

In March 1998, Matthew Beck, an accountant for the Connecticut State Lottery, arrives at work with a 9-mm Glock pistol and a knife inside his leather jacket. He stabs the vice president of operations in the chest, then walks around the cubicles, shooting specific co-workers. Before the killings, Beck had complained of having to do work outside his duties.

Horrifying, bloody incidents in the workplace earn bold, front-page headlines. Such tragic events are not senseless and unpredictable acts of violence, some experts say. They are unresolved conflicts that have been allowed to brew over time until an employee explodes. And, experts say, people like Baker, Beck, Lemos and McDermott didn't just snap overnight. There were signs.

The recipe for disaster: Take the ridiculous workload of IT professionals combined with a shortage of qualified workers and mix with unresponsive or bullying bosses.

"The high-tech industry, especially, has a lot of the characteristics of high-risk factors for violence," says Richard Denenberg, co-author of the book, The Violence-Prone Workplace (Cornell University Press). "Tight deadlines, a highly competitive atmosphere and being worried that your company might go out of business tomorrow are the very things causing high stress for technology workers," he says.
       
Workplace stress is found in virtually every sector and is not a new issue. But it seems to become a notable problem only after a shooting, stabbing or other violent act has occurred.

Denenberg cited a 1999 study by Yale University's School of Management, which surveyed workers throughout the country. When asked, "How often are you angry at work?" more than 20 percent of respondents answered, "All the time." That seed of dissatisfaction often grows as time passes. "People are afraid to confront the person directly. They tip-toe around him or her, and it makes their work life unpleasant," Denenberg says.

The Belly of the Beast

An underlying force is destroying work environments every day.

"The more pervasive problem is this lurking noncivility, intimidation and insecurity, which greatly affects the workplace," says David Yamada, associate professor of law specializing in labor and employment issues at Suffolk University Law School in Boston.

A workplace bully, Yamada says, is someone who repeatedly mistreats either a co-worker or a subordinate, often in subtle ways.

After the incident in December at Edgewater Technology, the company released a statement saying McDermott's actions "apparently stem from occurrences in his personal life. There was no way to anticipate his actions or any apparent reason to restrict his access to the building."

But McDermott reportedly had an outburst over the issue regarding his wages the week before the shootings.

"People don't just snap out of the clear-blue sky," says Lewis Maltby, president of the National Work Rights Institute in Princeton, N.J., an organization that spun off from the ACLU.

"People don't normally go from happy to dissatisfied right away," Maltby says. "They get more and more unhappy, and then they go over the edge. But there are always signs that a person is starting to unravel."

A sign could be subtle, such as a person becoming more reserved or projecting aggressive behavior that is out of character for the individual, he says.

Nearly 7,600 workers were victims of homicide in the workplace between 1980 and 1989, according to available data from the National Traumatic Occupational Facilities Surveillance System. Eighty percent of the victims were males, although homicide was the leading cause of occupational death for women. Companies can do something to reduce the risk of violence while preserving their most valuable assets -their employees.

Denenberg, co-director of Workplace Solutions, a nonprofit organization that creates violence-prevention programs for companies, notes that acknowledging the potential for violence in any workplace is the first step for companies.

"Typically, you can increase understanding [through] role-playing situations in the workplace where an employee, let's say, is having problems with a manager," Denenberg says.

Randomly selected high-tech companies chosen by VARBusiness were reluctant to discuss whether they had any policy to address workplace violence. But some are talking about the subject with their workers. Hewlett-Packard, for example, distributes a pamphlet to its employees on its violence-prevention program.

"The security of HP employees is vital," the pamphlet states. "Violent threats or acts affecting HP or occurring on HP property will not be tolerated." If trouble arises, HP employees are asked to fill out and sign an incident report form.

In reality, though, most people tend to look the other way.

"It's a hell of a lot easier just to ignore the person because you don't want to be the one to tell HR, 'Listen, I think this guy's about to crack.' We don't trust our judgment," Yamada says.

Companies should also be concerned about mistreated workers sabotaging their systems. Respondents to a 1998 survey by the Computer Security Institute in San Francisco, an association of information security professionals, found computer attacks by their own employees were a serious threat. As cited in Namie's book, the survey found 70 percent of those who were authorized to use their companies' networks reported one to five incidents originated inside the company that year.

Companies that could place a dollar amount on such damage reported an average annual total of nearly $137 million in losses.

Correcting Old Ways

There is a common management belief that to be productive, workers must be cracked with a whip, Maltby says.

"You can be a tough boss, but respect your employees," Maltby says. "Meanness becomes a desire to be valued, and that's crazy. How can a company say people are their most valuable asset, and then be mean to them?"

Yamada and Namie are working on introducing legislation, first in California, to provide legal redress for targets of workplace bullying, abuse and harassment, without regard to protected class status.

"Bullying is the sexual harassment of 20 years ago; everybody knows about it, but nobody wants to admit it," Maltby says.

Needless to say, not all managers are bullies. And once-abused IT professionals like Brandenburg are beginning to see that all of corporate America is not cruel. Today, Brandenburg works full time as a call analyst for a large software company in North Carolina and part time as a network administrator for an insurance company.

"My managers, for the most part, are easy-going," Brandenburg says. "But the less they yell in my ear, the more time I have to get the job done."