PART 2: Workplace Bullying - the period 2003 - 2024

The first part dealt with my initial activism in workplace bullying. My first book with a late colleague (Corporate Hyenas at Work by Susan Marais [now Steinman] and Magriet Herman) in 1994, launched by Tito Mboweni, the first international academic and victim internet group and my first research in South Africa commissioned by the ILO, WHO, ICN and PSI.

In 2003, I became an Ashoka Fellow (a fellowship for leading social entrepreneurs worldwide), which freed me to chase my dream of promoting dignity in the workplace and eliminating violence and bullying. As the pioneer in the field, Ashoka expected me to raise awareness and “replicate” myself by inspiring others to do the same.

The first international conference on workplace bullying was held in South Africa in November 2003. This conference was organised by the Work Trauma Foundation (a non-profit founded and financed by me) and the DENOSA trade union. The conference was a huge success, with international speakers from the USA, Australia, Canada, and the UK. There was awareness of the problem among the trade unions in general. However, the Code against workplace harassment was still many years away.

Raising awareness about workplace bullying and inspiring employers to do something about it was an uphill battle. I realised that our non-profit organisation would not receive donations – especially from the corporate sector, who at that point believed that workplace bullying and an aggrieved employee were the flipside of the same coin. I structured the NGO and my business into an enterprising non-profit and consultancy providing a service while advocating for bully-free workplaces and getting others to join. More than anything else, there were victims needing coaching and representation, mostly on a pro bono basis. However, the financial battles of the early days paid off with a marked increase in awareness.

At the Work Trauma Foundation, which later became the Workplace Dignity Institute, we reached the hearts and minds of many human resources professionals. At the same time, we arranged workshops to address workplace bullying as a cluster of psychosocial problems through a program developed by the International Labor Organization called SOLVE.

In 2004, we piloted the programme VETO by the World Health Organisation at the Gauteng Health Department (GHD).? This programme addresses workplace violence in the health sector based on the research I did the previous year. Marion Borcherds, the then director of Employee Wellness at the GHD, welcomed the programme and her insights led to workplace bullying finding its “home” within the wellness fraternity in the health sector.

The GDH contracted me to roll out the VETO programme to staff at all the hospitals, resulting in changed attitudes and heightened awareness. This was the first large-scale rollout of a programme to prevent workplace violence and bullying in South Africa. In 2006, with the support of the GDH, I published Magnificent Outcomes—An Account of the Struggle and Victory over Workplace Violence at the Gauteng Department of Health. Together with Marion Borcherds, we exhibited this at the Global Health Conference in Washington.

The programme was for the private sector and certain professions. In 2007, I addressed a parliamentary committee to introduce a Code of Good Conduct to Prevent and Deal with Workplace Violence. At this stage, workplace violence, which includes bullying, was and still is the preferred term used by the WHO. Interestingly, workplace bullying was debated fiercely as being the right word internationally. Some called it mobbing, emotional violence, incivility, emotional abuse and so on. The word was associated with the schoolyard, not the corporate corridors, and not so palatable for everyone. However, many activists relentlessly advocated the word "bullying" as the preferred term, and eventually, it was universally accepted. It was evident that workplace bullying must be linked to other psychosocial problems in the workplace. ?The Services Seta commissioned me to develop the Yethu iWellness Toolkit for the Services Seta with colleagues to address psychosocial problems in the workplace, emphasizing a holistic approach incorporating a framework to deal with bullying. All SETA members received a toolkit.

The VETO programme was successfully adjusted for the private sector as more companies realized the importance of having dignified and bully-free workplaces. A body of knowledge and insight into the phenomenon was emerging in South Africa, with more employers and academics taking note. In 2008, my doctoral thesis at UJ told the story of the first book and initiatives in bullying in South Africa. The same year, another doctoral candidate did a case study thesis on workplace bullying.

In the same year, I published “Don’t Take SH*T from Hyenas in the Workplace and published a second edition in 2010.

Since 2013, there has been an exponential increase in interest in workplace bullying in South Africa, and I have become very busy investigating and introducing programmes and interventions. While few professionals were in the fields as consultants or specialists, awareness was heightened. Workplace bullying earned its rightful place as a field of academic inquiry; employers showed determination to get rid of bullies in the workplace, with several candidates pursuing doctoral studies, such as H W Meyer, NWU (2014), M Borcherds UP (2014), N Motsei UP (2015) and several others whom I have not met personally but not less important.[1] There was also a surge in Masters’ dissertations on workplace bullying. Others wrote academic journal articles focusing on dynamics within certain professions. To my delight, the issue of the bullying of domestic workers was also tackled.

The Code of Good Practice on the Prevention and Elimination of Harassment in the Workplace, introduced by the South African government, now forces employers to take workplace bullying seriously, emphasizing the necessity for awareness, education and intervention.

Several “bully books” have seen the light in South Africa. Dr Octavia Mkhabela published her book in 2023, “Workplace Bullying – a South African Perspective”, followed by Marion Scher’s book “Big Bully – An Epidemic of Unkindness” in the same year. In 2024, Dr Ngao Motsei’s book “Building Psychological Safe Spaces” proves that awareness of the scourge of bullying is on par with the rest of the world.

Still active and “crazy after all these years,” I entertain audiences with the Hyenas in the Workplace using a Jungian group dynamics theory. I hope that, with The Code in place, we will see a reduction in workplace bullying cases like in the European Union.

The question is—why did it take the SA government 30 years to realise that bullying is a problem in the workplace while the European Union tackled the issue almost 25 years earlier? South Africa has been dealing with so many issues in the last 30 years that bullying was put on the back burner until it exploded in the workplace.

But bullying has always existed since the beginning of time. Drastic changes in the composition of the workforce in the previous century changed the workplace, but the greatest impact was the “lean and mean” culture and large-scale retrenchments in the 1990s; with them, corporate culture changed, and bullying became rampant in the workplace.

However, given human nature, I will end this reflection like I ended my 2008 doctoral thesis: A luta continua…

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