A new policy at University of Wisconsin aims to eliminate bullying among staff members on campus in hopes of positively impacting the working academic environment.
When Soyeon Shim, dean of the School of Human Ecology, began working at UW, she noticed some of her younger colleagues were afraid to report issues they were having with senior colleagues, Inside Higher Ed reported.
What the school has noticed is not based on data or information, Shim said in an interview with The Badger Herald. There was no research done on the subject.
Shim and Francois Ortalo-Magné, dean of the Wisconsin School of Business, combined their efforts and began charting a path toward legislation to resolve the issue.
“The beauty of the legislation is that it provides us with a definition of what we are going to call hostile behavior,” Ortalo-Magné said. “Until we had it, we did not really have a framework to name the issue.”
This policy is only one component of an overall effort to improve the working climate on campus for faculty, staff and students, Ortalo-Magné said.
Specifically, it provides a legal environment in which the university can actually name what behaviors are a concern, Ortalo-Magné said.
“This fills a gap in our policy and procedures … before there was nothing that allowed us to even examine where the behavior was disruptive to all the people around the faculty,” Ortalo-Magné said.
This system is a more holistic, comprehensive approach, Shim said.
The policy was not put into place because UW was looking for a quick-fix approach to the problem, Shim said. The basis of the policy is creating a positive work environment, she said.
“We quickly realized it was not going to be one thing that would address everything,” Shim said. “It had to be a spectrum from awareness, education, prevention, all the way to remediation.”
Research in higher education has shown that hostile behavior is a cultural issue, Shim said.
With the absence of policy, universities have nothing to work with, Shim said. By having policy in place, it allows for a more effective way to bring attention to these cultural issues, she said.
“It is not just policy, it is a culture,” Shim said. “It is a cultural issue that people do not change their behaviors, even with policy in place. You can always fix bad things but if you do not educate to understand why it is important to have a positive work environment, we are not going to get there.”
When UW started the process of creating this legislation, all but one of the peer universities that UW was examining already had a legal framework, Ortalo-Magné said.
UW was behind in addressing the issue, Ortalo-Magné said.
“We were different in not having a legal environment to deal with the issue. Now, the difference is over and we have caught up with everyone else,” Ortalo-Magné said.
Ortalo-Magné compares this legislation to police cars monitoring a busy highway. The police cars are not hidden and everyone can see them. They do not give out any tickets, but everyone still drives at a reasonable speed.
By having a defined behavior and a framework to address hostile behavior issues when they come up, the hope is that people will realize what is appropriate and inappropriate, Ortalo-Magné said.
“My main view is the idea that a policy like that, the biggest impact it can have is to be irrelevant,” Ortalo-Magné said. “The chief objective is creating a safe environment for everybody.”
