Let’s Fight Back

  Demonstrated or threatening behavior that becomes the reason behind harassment, alarm or distress to another party is called workplace harassment. It has became one of the most sensitive topic of our society as it truly impacts the workplace management. A lot of psychological hazards occur within the workers because they face a lot of work stress at the work place and their behavior turns aggressive.  Workplace harassment and workplace bullying are initially identified as the core psychological problems according to the occupational health and safety laws around the world.

  This issue has gained a lot of attention by researchers. In order to investigate the workplace harassment issues, a little less amount of efforts are invested into it. The executive leaders (managers) are almost reluctant or unconscious about it and in the third world countries this matter is almost unseen. Today, we are going to discuss about the types of harassment at the workplace and how it can be avoided.

 

Discrimination

Treating someone unfavorably because of a personal characteristic is known as discrimination. It often happens because people make unfair assumptions about what people with certain personal characteristics can and cannot do. Mostly, it occurs when a workplace policy, practice or behavior  unfairly disadvantages someone because of a personal characteristic but it rather seems to treat all the other workers fairly.

 

Personal Biasness

An act of creating an intimidating and offensive work environment for the victim; that includes, inappropriate comments, offensive jokes or personal humiliation. Personal harassment at the workplace is not based on the categories such as race, gender, sex or religion rather it is the most simple and an easy way of bullying that can cause a lot of damage to the victim.

 

Psychological Harassment

Victims of workplace harassment often feel discouraged and demotivated on either a personal level or a professional level, or both, which later on impacts their psychical health, social life and work life negatively. It is caused due to psychological harassment which has a negative affect on an individual’s psychological well being. Psychological harassment can be identified by very simple facts, such as; isolating the victim’s presence, spreading rumors about them or opposing everything said by the victim.

 

Sexual Harassment

An unwelcoming sexual nature or a conduct seems to be known as sexual harassment. If a person feels the involvement of an intimated, offended or humiliated behavior by any sort of psychical, verbal or written form, being reasonably expected, then it means that they are a victim of sexual harassment.This kind of discriminatory behavior is illegal.

 

Verbal Abuse

Verbal abuse is not illegal unlike other types of harassment such as sexual harassment. Verbal abuse is identified by someone’s unpleasant behavior towards the victim. It is a result of personality conflicts at the workplace where victim faces mean behavior consistently, increased beyond casual negative gestures or something more than that. This kind of discriminatory behavior is mostly ignored and nobody is able to solve it because of which, a lot of damage is done to the victim mentally or emotionally or both.

 

Cyber Bullying 

Cyber bullying, also known as online harassment, which is a serious concern for employers. Rumors or gossips about them are spread all over the social media. They receive harassing messages, sometimes directly or indirectly. They are insulted by the online bullies as they share humiliating things about the victim through mass media. There are a lot of advantages of the digitally connected world but who knew that cyber bullies would use it against the workers to harass them.

 

Third Party’s Involvement 

Third party harassment is a type of workplace harassment that’s perpetrated by a “third party”, (someone from outside of the organization). Perpetrator are mostly vendor, supplier, customer or client of the company instead of a boss, supervisor or colleague.

Victims are often young adults in “low-status” or “low-power” jobs. The reason behind them being a victim is their position, their lack of experience in the company and their reluctance to cause a scene. Third party harassment remains under-recognized and is often swept under the rug in such a way that even an employer’s effort to take steps to stop the behavior goes wasted.

 

It is important to eradicate workplace harassment as it would be beneficial for the business world. It is important for a company to revive their policies and implement it. Employees should be trained about what harassment is, how to recognize it and how to report it. Updating the internal complaint system so that the employees feel safe and secured is also an important thing to do. Anonymity should be respected as the victims already fear the potential backlash and the lack of support might be worse than the harassment they already face.