Evolution of Mobbing: what disappeared? What evolved?

In recent past the 5 signs of mobbing in companies where identified as follow:

Verbal aggression: Workplace bullies are often verbally aggressive toward their targets. The aggression may take the form of a brusque or unpleasant tone when speaking to the victim. In addition, the target may be subjected to insults and sarcastic remarks. Verbal aggression may include sexual harassment.

Stonewalling: Victims of mobbing may find that their suggestions, projects and initiatives are being ignored by co-workers and supervisors. Requests for feedback, status updates or support go unanswered.

Exclusion: Mobbing targets often be excluded and even isolated in the workplace. Exclusion can be "accidentally" leaving the victim off a chain of emails, failing to invite the target to important meetings and refusing to socialize with the target both in and outside of the workplace. Sometimes, the target of mobbing may find themselves physically excluded in the workplace by having their desk or office relocated to an area far away from other team members.

Gossip and slander: Mobbing ringleaders and their supporters may initiate malicious gossip designed to humiliate and undermine the victim. Sometimes, the gossip is pure slander, in others, the gossip reveals personal information about the target that may be embarrassing but has nothing to do with the victim’s professional competency. In extreme cases, these campaigns may extend outside the office and into the industry or profession in which the victim works.

Physical aggression: Mobbing sometimes escalates into physical aggression. While workplace bullies rarely use physical aggression because they fear facing criminal charges, it can happen if the perpetrators have reason to believe that they will not suffer repercussions.

With the evolution of company’s policies, a change in the mindset of the people and even technology itself, some of these behaviours disappeared… or simply got transformed?

Let’s try to analyse:

Luckily it become everyday more and more rare to read of “physical aggressions” in workplaces (apart from very rare cases where an over frustrated employees entered their office with a loaded machine gun 😊 )

Verbal Aggression: In large companies, nowaday, it rarely happens to be “shouted at”, “Openly insulted” or “Sexually harassed” in a “public way”, but still there is some new form of it rooting even more deep in day by day meeting. The increased level of informality in the management of internal meetings allow, sometimes, to have some level of “confidentiality” among the participants that can degenerate and could give someone the opportunities to derive into a series of implied insults, half words left deliberately pending to allow a negative and disparaging interpretation for the target of such references. In the end, the attacked will not even be able to complain as all other participnts will confirm that "...he was joking, there was absolutely no intention of being offensive...".

Stonewalling and Exclusion: they become most predominant and, in some cases thanks to technologies, even simpler to mystify. Think about all those emails on tactical/strategic situation where “…I’m sorry: with so many names, forwards, replies… your address slipped out of the list!”, or, even psychologically worst, be placed in communication’s loop where either your ideas are simply ignored or your position is constantly doubted requiring different voices to confirm it.

These ones are the “main killer” in large/multinational companies.

Gossip and Slander: these are behaviour so “within” human’s DNA that I doubt we’ll ever be able to completely get rid of them and, furthermore, i personally think it's a matter of personal behaviour and education (something that an office is not supposed to teach you).

Sometimes technologies (or in some case the deliberated lack of them) allow the perpetration of these negative behaviours without being able to prove them: e.g. no way to record an online meeting (in some companies even the native OS features that allow it have been disabled).

How companies are trying to evolve, to mature to an higher level of workplace quality of life?

Some companies, originally with highly legal and sound motivations, have tried to promote the concept of delation: if you discover an inappropriate behaviour we offer you the channels to report it anonymously ... I wonder how many times these means have been used precisely to perpetrate a mobbing action.

How to get better?

I wish I had a solution apart from “being a real human being” or (as taught in Catholic schools) “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, but in the end it is simply this: to be a better self, to find strength in colleague’s diversities and to remain openminded to different ideas or positions.

Conflicts never pay off, collaboration always does.