Daphne project: 2003-152

Daphne Programme – Year 2003

Final Report

Project Nr.:JAI/DAP/03/152/W

Title:MOBBING Raising awareness on women victims of mobbing

Start Date: the 1November 2003End Date: the 31October 2004

Co-ordinating Organisation’s name: CRAS Centro Ricerche Affari Sociali

Contact person: Elena Ferrari

Name: Elena Ferrari

Address: Corso Vittorio Emanuele II 269

Postal code: 00186

City:Rome

Country: Italy

Tel. N°.: +39 06 68100232

Fax Nr.: +39 06 68130372

e-mail:

Website:

Partner Organisations’ names and countries:

University of Surrey (UK)

Kvinnoforum (Sweden), ITW (The Netherlands)

1. Aims of the project

Problem:

Mobbing is a phenomenon which started being identified in the early Eighties and from there on, fastly spread in the whole Europe. It can be defined as frequent harassment, 'torment' or discrimination and exclusion at the workplace by colleagues and/or superiors over a relatively long period. It has very serious consequences on health as it can lead to psychic disablement and occupational diseases, depression and psychosomatic symptoms. The firm is also damaged because the performance of both, the mobbed and the mobber, on the workplace is remarkably reduced. Mobbing has very high social and health costs, too caused by the necessity for medical treatment and early retirement. Mobbing occurs among both sexes, within every age and occupational group and within all branches and fields of work. Nevertheless, several studies show that young women have a much higher risk of being mobbed than men even if they make up a smaller share of all employees. Furthermore, women are also more affected by mobbing consequences because of gender discriminations and problems they usually have to face in the workplace.

Beneficiaries

Women employed in SMEs aged from 15 to 70.

Expected results

The main results expected are:

- Analysis of the actual situation of mobbing and mobbed women in Europe to understand the real incidence of mobbing in the 4 countries involved in the project;

- Highlight differences among countries about what mobbing is and how to address it and single out good practices adopted;

- Check how SMEs address the problem of mobbed women by identifying from 5 to 10 SMEs in each country involved which adopted innovative methods or actions to fight against mobbing;

- Exchange and adaptation of best practices to different social, cultural and working environment;

- Promotion of a European approach of mobbing in a gender perspective;

- Dissemination of the best practices and of this European approach to the management of SMEs through workshops, seminars, conferences to be held in Centres, Trade Unions, firms connected to the partners of this projects.

2. Implementation of the project

Planned activities

1Starting of the project, final budget, agreements, contracts, organisation of work. Expected result: analysis of the actual situation of mobbing and mobbed women in Europe;

2Researching

2.1A research on mobbing and mobbed women in Europe. How this problem has been addressed at the EU and European level.

2.2The incidence of this phenomenon in the 4 countries involved in the project and in the whole EU and Europe.

2.3 What has been done by Governments, Trade Unions, SMEs. Which are methods and actions adopted at EU, European and National level to deal with it. Expected result: Highlight differences among countries about mobbing in a gender perspective;

3To determine differences on what mobbing is and how it occurs to have a common ground definition and well defined specific characteristics of how mobbing occurs in each country involved. Expected result: Check how SMEs address the problem of mobbed women by identifying from 5 to 10 SMEs in each country involved which adopted innovative methods to fight against mobbing;

4SMEs and good practices

4.1To choose selection criteria to identify from 5 to 10 SMEs in each country involved in the project;

4.2To identify from 5 to 10 SMEs in each country involved in the project;

4.3To draft a comparative grid to single out good practices. Expected result: Exchange and adaptation of good practices to different social, cultural and working environment;

5Comparison

5.1 To compare results obtained till now about mobbing and best practices to address it; 5.2 To single out best practices which more than other can be useful at the EU and European level and can be better adapted to different situations and environments; Expected result: Promotion of a European approach of mobbing in a gender perspective;

6To promote the shared definition and methods of mobbing in a gender perspective at the European level through the work of each partner. Expected result: Dissemination of the best practices at the European level.

7Dissemination It will take place through:

7.1workshops and seminars for Managers of SMEs during which publications in 4 languages (English, Italian, Dutch and Swedish, according to the country) on mobbing and how to fight it will be distributed and delivered;

7.2articles to be published in specialised mass-media;

7.3an International Conference on mobbing and mobbed women to be held in Rome with the specific aim of spreading the obtained results.

Implemented activities

During the project period the majority of the planned activities have been implemented. Some of them have been slightly changed as the partnership went on in the project’s implementation.

Activity 1 has been implemented as it has been foreseen. It was mainly a routine work but it was very useful to better understand how to implement our work and to share the lead partner ideas with the other partners. In this first activity, it was not difficult to find information on the general situation of mobbing and mobbed women in Europe.

Activity 2 was much more difficult to implement. During the first meeting we organise our work and we try to identify the best way to do things also according to our specific skills. Thus, we decided that it was very important to be focussed on women and on SMEs as these were the priority issues of our project. SMEs were important because the situation of mobbing within them has not been really analysed, usually studies on mobbing have been done in the public sector and in big firms and multinationals that is why we decided that they were not in the scope of our project. Moreover, we decided it was better to fix the number of employees which had to be between 10 and 100 as otherwise they were too small, often family businesses, where certainly they might be problems but not mobbing and not over 100 as then they were too big and problems as well as solutions would have been more those of a multinational than those of a SME.

Once the main features were decided we started working and we also started finding difficulties. First of all, it was very hard to deal with the problem in an homogenous way as the phenomenon itself was defined in different ways in different languages and, at first, we were not sure about what we were talking about. It was very difficult to find information about mobbing and women. When this was possible it was because the issue was sexual harassment but there were very little information on workplace harassment and women. This was particularly true for Italy and The Netherlands while Sweden and the UK had less problems. Finally, the majority of the National websites of mobbing are just in the National language and this make very difficult to find and compare information in a country that is not yours. For the same reason, it was also difficult to get information on European countries which were not part of the EU.

Activity 3 was implemented even if its aim was modified. Mobbing was analysed in its main characteristics and the reality of each country was compared with that of the other ones.

Partners major findings were related to:

Italy:

  • cultural and social characteristics of the country in which it takes place
  • transferability. It is not possible to transfer and to adapt to Italy patterns and criteria adopted as valid in other contexts;
  • Gender issue. Mediterranean countries are still dominated by a male culture;
  • Italian legislation. There are adequate tools to tackle the problem but if mobbing is not fully recognised as a crime there is no way it can be prosecuted by law.

UK:

  • Sector differences on the incidence of mobbing;
  • Victims. The definition of victims for people subjected to mobbing which can lead to the idea that they are innocent victims while there is always a collusion between mobber and mobbed;
  • The importance of the responsibility of the management;
  • The importance of the Enterprise culture;
  • The fact that both the mobber and the mobbed can be a person and a group.

Sweden:

  • Problem of power politics related to mobbing;
  • Gender, different types of mobbing for women and men;
  • Sometimes mobbing includes harassment some others they are two different things;
  • Even in a State where Social Welfare is very important and the rights of employees are really taken into account there is a high incidence of mobbing.

The Netherlands:

  • Definition, it’s very broad
  • Prevention, employees have stipulated an agreement to prevent violence in the workplace.

What was really hard to achieve was to check how SMEs address the problem as it seems that many SMEs don’t know what is mobbing or don’t think that it can occur in SMEs. Certainly, it is not a problem addressed and it is important to stress that mobbing can even be tougher in a SME as it is a small environment with no possibility to be transferred in a different branch or office. As a consequence, to identify 5 SMEs to work with, we basically tried to look for businesses which had something like an Ethic certification or which had special code of conducts for workers. However, we couldn’t find any best practice clearly related to mobbing and it was also very difficult to find SMEs which accepted to have their employees interviewed. Only the Swedish partner had less difficulties on it and it could interview SMEs which actually had developed good practices on mobbing.

Even if the activities related to SMEs had to be modified we succeeded in keeping everything else as planned. Thus, we promoted the shared definition on mobbing and we stressed the importance of considering it in a gender perspective.

It was impossible to choose a single definition of mobbing. Even at the national level there were many different definitions, each of them stressing a different feature of the problem. This activity was delayed, at the end, the selected definition was that suggested by the EU:

“Mobbing is a negative form of behaviour, between colleagues or between hierarchical superiors and subordinates, whereby the person concerned is repeatedly humiliated and attacked directly or indirectly by one or more persons for the purpose and with the effect of alienating him or her.”

Advisory Committee on Safety, Hygiene and Health Protection at Work of the European Commission in its “Opinion on Violence at the Workplace”, adopted in 2001.

To which we added the definition given by the psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and family therapist Marie-France Hirigoyen (in Italics) with a small addition (in bold):

The tactics used in a harassment situation consist in hostile actions intended to isolate the victim, downgrade his/her working conditions (reducing his/her autonomy, giving too much or too little work, not giving promotion), attack his/her dignity (criticism, insults, defamatory remarks) or commit physical or verbal violence against him/her. The harasser, as well as the harassed, can be an individual or a group. Often the harasser holds a higher position in the firm or public-service department, but harassment can also be directed by subordinates against their superior.

According to a survey on working conditions carried out in 1996 by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, 10 12 million workers in Europe consider themselves to be victims of harassment.

Opinion of the Committee on Women’s rights and Equal Opportunities for the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs on harassment at the workplace (2001/2339(INI)).

The dissemination as well was kept as foreseen and it was very successful. Each partner organised a National workshop for managers of SMEs in its own country. These workshops have been interesting as people who accepted to take part to them were really interested in understanding the phenomenon and critically analyse their behaviour and their working environment. So it turned to be something more then the sharing of information. Actually, it turned out to be an opportunity to better understand the dynamics in the workplace. The booklets produced by the project as a tool to help both victims and SMEs managers in dealing with mobbing have been made up of a general part on mobbing and women in Europe and a National part in which each country highlighted specific features of the phenomenon giving advice on where to go to find help.

Articles have been written and published on the internet (UK and The Netherlands) or on newspapers (Sweden).

An International Conference was held in Rome on the 11th of October 2004.

It has been organised in 2 plenary sessions and 4 round tables:

Round Table 1

Cultural dimension of Mobbing

Round Table 2

Personal Impacts of mobbing

Round Table 3

Policy and Strategies

Round Table 4

Practices and Services

Each partner led one round table and brought some guests who had to actively take part to one or more round tables, giving their contribution.

The output of the International Conference was the creation of a network, as guests asked to keep in touch one to another in order to work together against mobbing. Information were shared and a new possibilities to co-operate arisen.

Activities that were not implemented

Some of the activities foreseen in the project proposal have been modified during the implementation of the project, the major changes occurred at activities 4 and 5. The main problem we had to deal with, was the fact the many SMEs denied the problem or preferred not to talk about it. After the first months, we thought that it would have been really hard to make interviews with the declared intent of finding good practices. So, we decided to reach our aim in a different way.

We agreed on:

Size of SMEs between 10 and 100 employees. 5 enterprises for each country involved.

Interview the Human Resource manager and some employees possibly at least a man and a woman.

Case study format. To include gender in all the headings.

We arranged to do first of all, 4 steps:

  1. Contact our networks to see if we could do research;
  2. Identify a range of SMEs interviews;
  3. See if they wanted to be involved in good practices studies;
  4. Meet their Human Resource Managers.

We looked at:

preventing policies and tools for the development of potential good practices, meaning with that:

Description of preventive tools;

Summary of methods;

Find out innovative elements and transferability.

Thus, as far as SMEs were concerned we collected data on:

  1. the company policy which should be written;
  2. what happens in practice;
  3. any evidence = evaluation.

then, we critiqued = giving our views on A., B., C. in two ways: case studies and issues and concept to come to our definition and then write the recommendations from the project.

After that, we compared obtained results and singled out preventing policies and tools for the development of good practices which could be more useful at the EU and European level.

Unforeseen activities

Among the adjustments we did during the implementation, there were also some activities which were not foreseen in the project proposal but turned out to be very important for the attainment of the project goals. These were:

The website;

The common bibliography;

The Resource book;

The International guests who took part to the Conference;

The networking activities.

Did you revise the timetable at any point and why?

The timetable was slightly revised when the project was half way through.

The main problems were related to:

  • The budget. The total amount of money was not easy to share among partners as only some activities were to be done by all partners. This activity took much more time than what had been foreseen.
  • The research on mobbing in Italy took more time as it was then translated.
  • The development of a common bibliography took time as it was difficult to find a format which could be used by all partners.
  • The reports on the incidence of mobbing in the 4 countries involved in the project took time. Due to the delay in presenting reports it was not possible to develop a common definition. It was suggested to choose the more relevant national definitions to be presented at the meeting, the common definition was selected one month later.
  • Find a way to involve SMEs in the project. Thus, this activity was delayed and carried out by all partners between May and August. The only partner who had no problems with it was the Swedish one which then gave us inputs on how to select SMEs and how to do the interviews.
  • CD ROM. The project dropped the idea of a CD ROM and preferred to use all the money for the booklets and the Final Conference (after the authorisation given by the EC).

All other activities were implemented as planned.