vox-popPRcareers

The following account as told to vox-popPRcareers is of a media professional’s experience of being bullied at work. To protect the privacy of the individual, this is anonymous, as the company is well-known.

I was the communications co-ordinator/manager. My duties included writing the communications plan, writing internal and external communications. I began to feel bullied by my line manager (the project manager) almost immediately after he started in his post (two weeks after I started in mine). It was almost as if he took an instant dislike to me and distrusted me to do my job. The bullying began by him being nice to my face, but effectively putting obstacles in my way to doing my job properly and demanding total control over individual outputs when it didn’t make sense and I could have communicated directly with those individuals.

After a month of his behaviour I complained to the chief executive of the organisation that was hosting the project and asked for the situation to be resolved somehow. He shouted at me and told that if I didn’t like working there, I could leave. He called me into his office more than once to humiliate me and shout at me.

The project manager also did the following: Organise a team lunch on a day that I’d already booked off, trying to prevent me from attending meetings and demanded that I no longer work from home one day a week despite this having been agreed initially. The manager organised an important full team trip to Devon on a week that I’d booked to take off on holiday (and that he’d signed off).

I changed my holiday plans to attend. Accused me of bullying him by putting a complaint to the chief executive despite there being no evidence, constantly undermining me and putting obstacles in my way for me doing my job. When we had supervision and he asked me to type up the notes, he didn’t like what I’d written and tried to force me to change them to make him appear in a better light. Yet, he was constantly ‘smarmy’ and nice to my face, so it appeared to others that he was a good boss.

The chief executive called me into his office once and accused me of “having difficulty being managed by men” of having “the same problems with men in my past jobs!”, accusing me of wanting my manager sacked and various other accusations leaving me in tears and shocked by his attitude. The next time that he called me in, I was told that I was being accused of being a bully (by my boss) and that I had 24 hours to refute this.

When I returned the following day with a full case refuting all of the accusations, the chief executive then said that despite the lack of evidence, he had decided to sack me. I wish I had lodged a formal complaint against my manager, but there would have been no point. As I had only been in the job for two months, there didn’t need a reason and it was legal for them to do this. I couldn’t prove sexual discrimination, though it was clear to me that there was an element of this in the way that I was treated. The manager continues to bully the other two women in the team, one of whom has recently resigned.

I was extremely stressed and angry for much of the time in the job. I am near tears when thinking about it now a year later. I knew that I was good at the job, and wanted to stay in it but it was getting intolerable. My confidence took a battering and I had to constantly employ stress management techniques to keep my head above water emotionally.

I started looking for jobs pretty soon after I realised how bad the manager was at his job and that I was being bullied by him because of his insecurities. However, as I had only been in the job for a short while I was worried as to how this would look at applications for future work and to future employers so I never actually applied for anything.

I could do little outside work but talk about the situation and I just wanted my manager’s behaviour to be exposed. After I was sacked, though I was utterly upset to have lost my job, and angry about how I was treated, I was also relieved to be out of there. I had too much pride to leave of my own accord.

Advice for any professionals being bullied in the PR industry:
Keep your head and try and deal with the situation as unemotionally as possible. Not easy at all. Try not to let it destroy your confidence and don’t worry about what others might think about you. It’s not your problem, it’s the bully’s.