1. The long-term view.   

If all things remain the same in your workplace, how long could you stick with the job? Consider the  culture of your company: What seems to be tolerated or overlooked by management and/or support staff?  If you see no signs of improvement (a new boss or departmental transfer) in a timeframe that is within reason for you, then it’s time to create your exit plan.

     2.  Obsessing over the situation.

–   If you find yourself thinking and talking about your job and boss at an increasing rate – not in a good way;

–   If you find thoughts of work-related injustices repeatedly racing around in your head or if you are constantly trying to strategize how to handle the next confrontation;

–  If all semblance of work life balance is out the window since mentally you remain at work, it is time hit the road.  

3.  Impact on health.

This by far is the greatest indicator of whether you should continue to work for a person or company you find intolerable. No matter how you try to suppress your stress response to your work environment, your body will start sending subtle nudges that something needs to be addressed. Not feeling too great occasionally progresses to where you find yourself regularly in your doctor’s offices. It’s time to wake up and realize that if you hang on to your job while your health is going down the tubes, you will discover your old awesome, dynamic self gradually disappearing. Make plans for a new job while your health is screaming for attention.

Next Steps 

If, after careful consideration, you decide to leave, develop your exit strategy. Your exit strategy will consist of putting a plan in place to help you find a job:

* Updating your resume,

* Honing your interview skills,

* Networking,

* Taking an additional course or two to make yourself more marketable.

On average the well-prepared job hunter takes about six months to land a new position. This would be the optimum time to research best job hunting practices to gain a competitive edge since you wouldn’t want to quit your current job without a new job in place.

While gearing up for your job search, embrace the positive emotions of knowing your bad situation will be coming to a rewarding end. Be mindful and appreciative of any and all gains you made in your current job. This will also help you keep your cool at work while implementing your strategy. Above all, focus on the new job opportunity that will be coming your way. Surprisingly, positive thinking goes far by clearing the path to allow good things to happen for you.   

Most important, along with your new job road map, start spending time on as many self-care activities as possible to help you heal from the negative effects you experienced at your job. Get massages, pick up your favorite hobbies, reconnect with old friends. This is so important because the situations endured at the hands of Bosszilla can have lasting effects and you want to say bye-bye to all that stress while bringing your life back to a healthy balance.

http://abusergoestowork.com/fair-pay-for-white-collar-workers/

If you surf the net or are an avid reader, you can’t escape the information swirling around about being in the moment. Our lives are so caught up with the increased demands of work, family obligations and/or school that our minds are leapfrogging to what comes next. This is a recipe for stress that causes poor eating habits, lack of sleep and overall poor health hygiene. Enter here: LIVING IN THE MOMENT.

Being in the moment is a great precursor to meditation. But, even if you are not into being all Zen, at least you can start regaining some control over your sanity by slowing down your mind when engaged in particular activities throughout the day. It is a matter of focusing on all the small, usually overlooked details of the experience.

How many times during the last full month did you free your mind enough to fully engage in a fun activity? Did you recently pursue a hobby or attend a social event in which you allowed yourself to be fully in those moments and not thinking about the upcoming  business meeting?

Make an appointment with yourself to do something special-something truly enjoyable, and allow yourself to fully soak up all the good feelings emanating from that experience.

You can find me at workplacesanctuary.wordpress.com

(Updating the Workplace Sanctuary blog is underway)

http://www.bullyfreeatwork.com/is-the-bully-at-work-still-not-hearing-you/

Resculpt your life – that is a good way to approach it. Many of us walk around following the routine that was laid out for us perhaps by family, friends or by society, yet at our core, we may be totally dissatisfied by what is going on both inside and around us. I suggest digging well below the surface and find the old things that meant happiness and see if it still holds true. When we can scrape the surface of what made us happy we often find that we have drifted so far off our mark we don’t know if and when we will get back to that place of true joy.

A million dollars would be great to have but of course we know that money buys very real yet very temporary joy. Taking that dream a step further, that million dollars would have been easier to attain through employment 10 or 15 years ago than now with salaries not staying abreast of cost of living.

Family-related activities bring joy, but work hours and related stresses affect how and when we do interact with family. The other factor is that society currently dictates is that the more time children spend in organized activities translates into some kind of better life. Better for the child? So if I get this right, both parents work all week, then the kids are engaged in activities after school and on weekends. With consistent time crunches, meals are of the grab and go variety. That doesn’t seem like fun to me. But then again I think at times the expression on both children’s and parents’ faces say it all.

Singles don’t always fare better. I contracted with a young single woman who I thought had a successful life. Then I witnessed her boss yelling at her, which I learned he did regularly. Without understanding the dynamics of their working relationship I  wondered if this was a good employment match since she had lots of health issues which seemed to have been related to work stress.

There has been a surge in the psychology and science of happiness and it is quite timely. In an era when there appears to be advances and opportunities as never before, so is the increase of physical and mental health issues. Somehow the way we live our lives don’t reflect the anticipated benefits from these strides.

No we can’t just up and quit jobs and stay home and spend hours in leisure activities, but I throw out the suggestion to take some time to evaluate your life and discern what the happiness factor is in your life.

Some of the factors that feed or starve our happiness are:

How we feel about ourselves

How we feel about making a living

How we feel about our relationships

How we feel about our non-work life

This is just a basic exercise that may jolt what may be derailing your level of happiness. Perhaps the one area that causes the most unhappiness could be your starting point in making a shift toward a happier life.

Now I must include here that sad/bad things do happen in life. Resilience is the ability to recover from these things in a timely manner. When we have great difficulty or can’t recover from a hurtful or traumatic event then we may need to seek out the appropriate support to help us develop our resilience.

In upcoming blogs I will be delving deeper into happiness but it is up to you to find out which adjustments you need to make to start creating your path to happiness. In researching this topic, you will find lots of great information, but the various “formulas” vary from writer to writer. This is actually a good thing because you can combine different suggestions to create the right fit for you. Since we all have different genetic makeup and lead different lives, so we find that we can tailor a formula for our own personal happiness fit.

Prior to starting this blog, I wrote about money management for women. This came about  when working in my HR capacity  and  learned about the staffs’ (primarily female) views on money. The blog was well received but I stopped writing  it since I felt I could no longer do justice to the topic because, as mentioned, the economic climate was going through some serious changes and my prior knowledge and experience no longer rang true in my view.

Since I did keep the Workplace Sanctuary blog, though not updating, I noticed that occasionally a few readers did pop on the sight, perhaps looking for answers to their own situations. I decided to renew the blog and see where it leads. 

Though I’m still in the process of updating and expanding the blog to cover a broader range of issues that impact how we make a living in our changing society, please feel free to browse around check back to see what’s new

Do follow my posts on Twitter: @pimentelft

You can send me a personal email at wwsanctuary@gmail.com

PEACE

Within the website, documentary filmmaker Beverly Peterson and her team have made available a number of resources and information that I recommend you explore. Education on this issue provides the tools for change. And, I must say, Ms. Peterson has done a superlative  job on capturing the many sides to workplace bullying via multi-media platforms.

Please explore her website nojobisworththis.com

A personnel department has very specific responsibilities in a company.  They [should] have familiarity of labor laws, they should know employee benefits, implement protocol and understand how the roles of employees make the company fulfill its mission.  But ultimately, the human resources department is there to support the best interest of the company. The individuals in that department are also insuring their own jobs.

If a manager is mistreating a staff member, I would think that the HR rep would inform the boss how his or her actions may be violating, let’s say, anti-discrimination laws, depending on what form the bullying takes.  But once informed the bully can take his attacks in any direction and unless the higher ups in the company rein in the bully, things can quickly get worse from the time of the complaint on.

The HR rep has done her job by informing the boss of his actions, now the rep can go along with the bully by either ignoring the situation or being roped into the scenario by backing the boss.  The HR rep will not outwardly take part in the bullying but will start maintaining one-sided documentation provided by the bully/boss. 

Now don’t get me wrong; your human resources department is vital to the functionality of your place of employment and at sometime you will have to loop them in to what’s happening with your abuse but consider this on an fyi basis.  Your rep definitely can be of help to you if they have the moral fortitude, but they also are looking out for their own jobs and have to lean toward the side on which their bread is buttered. For many who work in the field of human resources, it is not an easy road, but is clearly founded on discretion and confidentiality. 

I share this information so you don’t score points for the opposing team. If you are a victim of workplace bullying, be wise, be discrete and document everything so when the time comes when you have to go to your human resources representative, you go with clarity and a realistic approach.

 For more information on this, go to my website at www.workplacesanctuary.com

We can, first of all, assume that the witness is glad that they are not the bully’s target.  So if the torment falls on the usual victim, then at least it’s not falling on the witness (es).  The next step though, which is the challenge in the long run is to be sure to stay on the bully’s good side. That is easy at first, but if a person has a moral code, and that code is continually challenged by what he or she is witnessing, it does turn into a stressful situation. That employee knows that he or she always has to be, not only on the bully’s side but be cognizant that they are appropriately boosting the bully’s ego. That’s because bullying tends to come down to the wielding of power and feeling in full control.

The stress therefore, is not as fast and hard-hitting as on the targeted victim of the bullying, but it does have a gradual and perhaps escalating effects on the witness.  And rest assured that it does happen and presents a whole set of basic concerns that need to be addressed by the witness.  Those issues are:

1.  Self-care, both emotional and physical so the stress in minimized;

2. Finding a way to support the victim. It can be anonymous but will be of immense value to the victim and allay growing feelings of guilt for the witness, and

3. Jotting down notes about incidents of bullying that are witnessed.  At some point the witness may be asked to speak out on what he or she has seen or heard. If the witness does decide to take that step, then he/she will be prepared to present truthful statements of observed incidents.

Some of you may not be in agreement with the information in this blog, but, if you are a witness, it is worth taking the time to decide what you should do if you do see bullying at your job.

Yes, this may be the coward’s way around dealing with this issue, but guess what! HR staff’s first line of allegiance is to the company that employs them, not the staff. With that in mind there may be HR personnel who do see what’s happening but feel powerless to help the victim.  By attending healthy workplace-themed conferences, the HR rep can learn about bullying along with other topics that make for a happier and more productive work environment.

As you can imagine there are any number of these types of trainings and conferences happening nationally and internationally.  The one I came across on Twitter is called Work, Stress and Health 2013: Protecting and Promoting Total Worker Health which will be taking place this May in Los Angeles. Maybe you can share the tip with the HR person with whom you may have a friendly connection. Details for this conference can be found at  http://www.apa.org/wsh