Davies Ndumiso Sibanda
IN many workplaces employees are abused or subjected to workplace violence, which is not good for the business, the employer and the employees.

There are cases where some chief executives, heads of department and supervisors are “terrorists” in the workplace as they are feared but not respected. Where such an environment obtains, the supervisor hardly meets his goals as employees expend some of their energies dealing with fear instead of working.

I know of one head of department who was known as no-nonsense man because he dismissed employees for even trivial mistakes. Interestingly, almost all the people he dismissed moved elsewhere and became very good and successful managers. When I asked one of such dismissed individual how he made it after dismissal, he said after dismissal in his new job he had a boss who built his confidence and career as opposed to the earlier boss who made him feel useless.

Employee abuse can be psychological assault, financial attacks, emotional damaging and rarely will they be physical. However for many women in particular assault has been physical with the boss sexually harassing them.

All these abuses in the majority of cases go unreported as the employees fear possible implications on their careers and job preservation. However, bottling up all these things is damaging on employees resulting in diminishing returns for the organisation.

Some of the employee abuse is carried in small doses but added together they become really big issues. For example paying employees poor wages that keep them almost destitute when the business can afford more and telling them that is what they are worth, getting workers to work unpaid overtime, practising tribalism and racism, and many others.

There are employees who have been unfairly dismissed, retrenched, retired or pushed to resign and when one looks carefully at each case there was no business prudence but it was about the boss throwing his weight around so that he or she can be feared. Generally such violence against workers is about building a power base and has very little to do with productivity.

It is easy to tell a manager or supervisor who is “violent” against his or her employees. Usually he is characterised by boorish behaviour, acts that cause distress, engaging in acts that demean workers, insensitive to workers needs and doing other things that show lack of humanity and in the end a silent war is waged with subordinates.

For organisation success there is a need to procedurally undertake labour relations audits so as to tell the level of job satisfaction amongst employees as on many occasions organisations spend money on machines yet the problem is people-related.

I know of cases where workers only met and surpassed targets when the boss was on leave and when he returned to work productivity went down and the workplace was characterised by plant problems that do not occur when he was away. Workers were responding to his style of leadership.

Where the department or organisation is characterised by abuse of employees in whatever form, there are generally productivity improvement problems as experienced workers leave in protest, others die of stress, others fall sick and don’t come to work, others miss work at the slightest opportunity, others engage in sabotage and many other self-preservation acts that are not in the interest of the business.

In conclusion organisations should be driven by managerial teams that have well developed people-management skills if they are to meet their goals.

Davies Ndumiso Sibanda can be reached on: Email: [email protected]