From the beginning, we here at Velamentis knew that trying to break down workplace abuse and make full sense of it as a concept would be challenging.
While phrases like “toxic behavior” and “workplace culture” are frequently discussed, we gained insights from both firsthand experience and research that trying to describe these experiences is often difficult to accomplish with accuracy, precision, and sometimes rationality.
For better or worse, the workplace isn’t a place where we expect to be dehumanized. We should be able to go into work knowing it is a safe space where we matter – we’re people, after all, not just cogs in a machine.
When you experience poor treatment at work, it’s like someone pressing pause on the cosmic time machine. There’s this blip where you can’t quite process that something so hurtful and demeaning just happened.
This occurs at the hands of a colleague or, worse, a manager whom we should have been able to trust in a professional capacity. At first, it feels so foreign and uncomfortable that we want to process it in a way which ignores or excuses the behavior.
Abuse, though, eventually stresses our bodies so much that we leap-frog from “I don’t want to make a big deal out of this” to “How could this be happening to me?!”
In order to help employees improve the way they catalog and describe such experiences, we knew we needed to develop a framework that establishes in the behaviors we commonly hear about in the workplace and ways in which they manifest.
In talking and working with our advisors and employment law consultant, it became clear that we also needed to think about how these behaviors differ based on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (aka Title VII). Thus, we developed the Mistreatment – Misconduct framework.
Mistreatment is defined as “managing work relationships in a way that is personally beneficial and intentionally or unintentionally lacks regard for others in the workplace.” Misconduct is a discriminatory form of mistreatment that targets employees of protected status(es).
For example, a manager may make disparaging comments about an employee, e.g., “She may as well wear a potato sack to work every day; she clearly doesn’t have any style.”
When that disparaging behavior targets someone of a protected status, such as a pregnant woman (pregnancy is a protected status) that behavior is considered misconduct.
For example, saying “Women look awful when they’re pregnant! They should just wear a potato sack to work every day,” is misconduct.
Both of these statements shouldn’t be said; however, statements like these are made by managers, and the options for employees to resolve mistreatment or misconduct are very different.
It is the case that mistreatment may happen one time only or only on extremely rare occasions. We’re human; sometimes we just have bad days. It’s natural to excuse mistreatment once or twice.
In fact, many of us have probably been guilty of mistreating a colleague once or twice. However, ongoing mistreatment is harassment and may become abusive.
Our willingness to excuse mistreatment behavior often lands us in situations where we get so used to bad treatment that we don’t even realize it’s gotten worse. This is why it’s beneficial to be able to identify these behaviors early on.
The elephant in the room, though, is that even if we properly identify these behaviors, what’s next? Reporting mistreatment or misconduct can be intimidating because it upsets the power dynamic typical of business organizations.
It’s the reason why whistleblowers and victims of retaliation are protected by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. I understand this very well; I’ve dealt with retaliation fromtwo senior managers – one of whom is now in an executive position.
For many of you, it isn’t shocking to read that someone who has committed misconduct has gotten promoted within an organization.
In fact, just the other day, I responded to a LinkedIn post about a toxic manager who, despite being reported to HR by multiple employees, was promoted anyway.
The point of Velamentis is to keep the conversation about workplace mistreatment and misconduct going, provide materials to help improve the lives of employees, and, ultimately, see if we can play a part in driving a paradigm shift in workplace culture.
We even hope to (dare we dream!) influence federal and state policies that concern this topic. We have learned so much so far and are working as fast as we can to develop the materials that may help you in your toxic workplace situation.
Help starts with learning how to frame your situation and identify the behaviors that, if escalated over time, may create an unhealthy lifestyle or state of mind for you.
We developed a one-page summary to introduce our mistreatment and misconduct framework, which we hope raises awareness of how mistreatment starts and progresses into worse situations.
For a lot more depth on the topic of mistreatment and misconduct, we also just released module 1 of our first tutorial series, An Introduction to Mistreatment and Misconduct.
This first module covers the differences between mistreatment and misconduct; the most common toxic workplace behaviors (with examples); and as the protected statuses that can distinguish whether behavior is mistreatment or misconduct.
Our second module, which is currently in development, will go into how to identify abusive behavior. Finally, the third module of this series will go into some depth about the impacts of workplace trauma.
I’ve said it before and it’s probably not a bad idea to say it again: Launching Velamentis is just the beginning for us. Currently, we’re working out some technical issues with the website and our learning platform.
We have a really exciting roadmap that includes audio, translations, podcasting, and a lot more content. We pay attention to feedback, so please don’t hesitate to let us know how we’re doing.
As a bootstrapped startup, we are working as hard as we can and appreciate the support we’ve already received. It’s certainly encouraging and absolutely motivating.
Jen
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Contributors:
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- Pamela Sampel: Subject Matter Expert
- Gary Whitmer: Subject Matter Expert
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