Trauma Informed Workplaces Shut Down Workplace Bullies

A Story Told Without Me

People who used to work with me, and who are still my friends, told me that a supervisor of mine at a former employer was talking about my character with other people. I was not in the room for any of those conversations. I did not know what was said, who heard it, or how long it had been going on. I did, however, have confirmed and first-hand evidence of the toxic practice.

I had worked for that employer more than once over the years, so I knew how far a story like that could travel. It was a large academic setting where the proverbial “telephone game” effect is alive and well. I sent the supervisor a cease and desist letter, which is a written legal demand to stop. It was a way to put my own account in writing, next to the one being told about me.

What I learned is that a person can be talked into being a problem. Someone starts the trouble, the reaction gets treated like an emergency, and then the people with the most power tell the story. By the time the story reaches a hiring committee or a board, the first event has dropped out of it. That pattern hurts people, it carries racism, and workplaces can stop it.

The Pattern Has Three Steps

Workplace abuse often follows three steps, and each one sets up the next.

Instigation comes first. A manager moves the goalposts on a project, leaves a person out of an email that everyone else got, or asks the same question in a meeting until the person pushes back. The pressure builds slowly, and it is hard to point to any one moment.

Manufactured crisis comes next. When the person finally reacts, the reaction gets treated as an emergency. Human resources gets a call, a write-up goes in the file, or someone says they felt unsafe. The workplace now has a problem to solve, and the problem has one name on it.

Narrative manipulation finishes the job. The people with the most rank write the account of what happened. The weeks of pressure are left out, the reaction stays in, and the written file becomes the story everyone believes.

Researchers saw this arc decades ago. Heinz Leymann, a German psychologist working in Sweden, studied about 800 cases of what he called mobbing, which is a group ganging up on one person at work. His phase model starts with a conflict that goes unresolved and ends with the target pushed out of the organization (Oxford chapter on Leymann; Leymann abstract).

Why It Works

The pattern works because it moves fast, it is propelled by power-structures, and the people watching stay quiet. A verdict lands before anyone asks what happened first, and the person with the higher title decides which version goes in the file. There is never a fair trial.

The Workplace Bullying Institute surveys American workers every few years, and its 2024 survey found that 32 percent of adults had been bullied directly at work. Most of that bullying came from above, at 55 percent, and another 29 percent came from peers (WBI 2024 flyer).

The same survey shows who pays the price. Targets had a 62 percent chance of losing their jobs, while the people who bullied them faced consequences at less than half the rate targets did. Coworkers stepped in to help only 2 percent of the time (WBI 2024 survey). In the 2021 survey, employers reacted negatively 60 percent of the time when bullying was reported to them (WBI 2021 survey).

Those numbers describe the scale of narrative manipulation in our workplaces. The person who was harmed leaves, the person who caused the harm stays, and the workplace keeps the version of events that made that outcome look fair.

The Same Behaviors Produce Racism

Racism uses the same three steps, and a stereotype makes the third step easier. When a Black woman reacts to pressure at work, many observers already have a story ready about who she is.

Daphna Motro and her colleagues tested this in two studies with 555 participants, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2022. People watched an employee get angry, and when the employee was a Black woman, they were more likely to decide the anger came from her personality. That judgment led to lower performance ratings and lower opinions of her ability to lead (study abstract). In one version, actors played employees reacting to negative feedback from a supervisor, and the researchers found no such difference between Black and white men (UBC summary).

The same bias shows up in written reviews. Textio, a company that analyzes workplace writing, studied real performance reviews and found that Black employees got 26 percent more feedback they could not act on than non-Black employees, while getting only 79 percent as much feedback overall (Textio report). White employees were called "ambitious" 4.9 times as often as Black employees (Yahoo on Textio). Textio sells software, so these are industry numbers, and they match what the academic research found.

Outside the office, the pattern is easy to see. In May 2020, Amy Cooper called the police on Christian Cooper, a Black man watching birds in Central Park who had asked her to leash her dog. She raised her voice, described herself as being in danger, and asked outside force to settle a small disagreement. All three steps happened in a few minutes.

Jennifer Freyd, a psychologist at the University of Oregon, named the move that holds this together. She calls it DARVO, which stands for deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender. The person who caused harm denies it, attacks the person who named it, and then claims to be the real victim. Freyd also describes institutional DARVO, when an organization does the same thing to someone who reports harm (Freyd research).

The Trauma-Informed Office

A trauma-informed workplace considers a strong reaction as evidence that harm happened. A trauma informed office listens to the context and looks at all the perspectives mindfully. That one change disempowers narrative manipulation, because the reaction is no longer the whole story. We have room to be human because failure is treated as a gift in the trauma-informed organization.

The federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, known as SAMHSA, lists six principles for trauma-informed organizations. They are safety, trustworthiness and transparency, peer support, collaboration and mutuality, empowerment with voice and choice, and attention to cultural, historical, and gender issues (Pennsylvania DHS summary). Each pair of principles answers one step of the pattern.

Michigan State University's human resources office already teaches supervisors these principles, including watching power dynamics in meetings and recognizing how racial trauma shapes a person's experience of work (MSU HR).

Five Cycle-Breaking Practices

Five practices disrupt these deadly and toxic behaviors. They work best together as part of a whole system.

Abolish the performance improvement plan

A performance improvement plan, or PIP, is a written plan that sets goals and a deadline, usually 30 to 90 days, with firing as the consequence for missing them. Human resources sources say plainly that a PIP builds a file that makes it harder for an employee to challenge being let go (Payroll Partners HR Support Center). One HR firm notes that employers often use PIPs to document a firing instead of helping someone improve (Brightmine). The PIP is where a manufactured crisis turns into paperwork, and ending it removes the paperwork. In my 30 years of executive leadership, I have never put one person on a PIP. I do promote nurturing and productive accountability and the PIP is the least imaginative and most toxic method of delivering support. PIP abolition is love in action.

A PIP also feeds the pattern while it runs. The 30, 60, or 90 day clock puts steady pressure on a person who may already be reacting to pressure, and every tense moment during those weeks can go into the file as more proof. When a PIP follows an instigated reaction, it takes the second step of the pattern and writes it down as the official account.

The HR field itself points to better tools. Brightmine notes that threats of pay cuts, demotion, or firing are less likely to improve performance than positive reinforcement, and it recommends more regular check-ins and a development plan that is less dire than a PIP (Brightmine). In a workplace without PIPs, a person who is struggling gets a development plan written with them, a peer mentor who knows the work, and a team that looks at the work together. The goals can be just as clear, and the person helps write them.

Make peer mentorship the form of supervision

When one supervisor can both provoke a reaction and judge it, the pattern runs easily. Peer mentorship spreads guidance across people at a similar level, so no one person holds all of it. Stacy Blake-Beard's research on African American leaders found that peer mentoring gave them a safe place to do the work of identity and leadership together (Blake-Beard).

In a peer mentorship model, each person has a small circle of colleagues at a similar level who know the work and meet with them regularly. The supervisor's job shifts toward coordinating the work and clearing obstacles, and the day-to-day guidance comes from peers. When tension starts to build, a person has someone to talk to before it turns into a crisis, and that peer has seen the weeks of pressure that came first.

Who surrounds a person early on matters a great deal. A study presented at the National Bureau of Economic Research looked at a firm that assigned new hires to teams without any input from the employees, and it found that early exposure to more white coworkers was linked to higher turnover for Black women within two years (NBER conference paper). Peer mentorship gives every new person a set of colleagues chosen to support them, so they are less alone during the months when the pattern is most likely to start.

Social work has trained people this way for a long time. Field supervision treats supervision as teaching, where a student brings real cases and a field professor helps them think. I have supervised social work students in the field for 15 years and learned so much by keeping my supervising “power-checked”. As the field supervisor, I don’t assign a grade. I show up every week to discuss ethics, process, growth, and development. It is an act of love in the workplace that can be replicated at scale with growing efficacy.

Replace annual reviews with presentations of learning

An annual review is one supervisor writing about one employee, once a year, mostly from memory. That is where bias like Textio's "ambitious" gap gets written down and kept, and where an instigated reaction from months ago can still shape a person's pay.

A presentation of learning turns that around. Schools in the Big Picture Learning and High Tech High networks ask each student to present their own growth to a panel, which can include advisors, mentors, peers, and family. At Big Picture schools these exhibitions happen at the end of each quarter, and the panel asks questions, gives specific feedback, holds the student to their own goals, and celebrates their growth (Big Picture Learning Windsor; Sweet Home Schools). Ron Berger traces the practice back to Deborah Meier's Central Park East schools in Harlem, where students graduated by exhibition (High Tech High Unboxed).

At work, a presentation of learning would happen two to four times a year. Each person shows what they worked on, what they learned, where they struggled, and what they want to learn next, using real examples of their work. A panel of peers, their mentor, and people they serve asks questions and responds. The person tells their own story first, which is the direct answer to narrative manipulation, and many people hear it at once, so no one person writes the account alone.

The research on bias in ratings supports the shape of this practice. Using several raters makes evaluations more reliable (University of Minnesota), and one study found that having raters recall specific work in a structured way reduced the effect of racial prejudice on ratings of Black male managers (Bauer, Wayne State). A presentation built on real examples of work, heard by many people, uses both of those findings.

Resolve conflict with values and repair

Restorative practice starts with what happened first, brings the people involved together, and works to repair the relationship. A 2011 study of one organization's move to restorative practice found that managers shared the weight of decisions, held their teams more accountable, and had fewer problems to handle, because coworkers were settling issues among themselves (Lambert and colleagues).

A restorative process usually happens in a circle or a small facilitated meeting. The people involved answer a few plain questions in turn: what happened, who was affected and how, and what is needed to make things right. Because the first question is what happened, the weeks of pressure come into the room along with the reaction, and the full sequence of events is heard by everyone present.

The Minnesota Department of Corrections offers a long example. Kay Pranis, who was the department's restorative justice planner, described how a small group of prison staff first used restorative circles to work through conflict among themselves. The practice spread to every Minnesota prison, and the department later wrote conflict skills into job descriptions, hiring, training, and policy (summary of Pranis, 2006). Pranis concluded that restorative work with people in prison was hard to sustain until staff culture matched the same values. A review of research on workplace harassment by Marcos Rolim found evidence that restorative justice can resolve harassment cases and help create workplaces that prevent them (Rolim).

The change takes time. The same 2011 study that found fewer problems for managers also found that becoming a restorative workplace can be a hard and frustrating culture change (Lambert and colleagues). The values have to come first, so the circle is a place for repair instead of a new room for the old verdict.

Make pay open and equal

Secret pay lets people reward favorites and punish targets quietly. When Denmark required companies to report wages by gender in 2006, the gender pay gap fell about 13 percent, and company profits did not change (Kenan Institute). A 2019 study of Canadian universities found that salary disclosure cut the gender pay gap by roughly 20 to 40 percent (Philadelphia Inquirer). Research on racial pay gaps is newer, and New York City's 2022 law is now being studied for both gender and racial effects (Russell Sage Foundation).

The racial gap is large. Federal data show that Latino, Black, and Native American workers earn on average 73 to 77 cents for every dollar a white worker earns (Maryland Matters). Pay is also tied to the review problem. Textio's research found that the groups who get the lowest-quality feedback end up earning the least (Yahoo on Textio). When a biased review sets a raise in secret, the third step of the pattern shows up in a paycheck.

Some companies have shown what open pay looks like. In late 2013, the software company Buffer published every employee's salary and the formula behind it, which weighs role, experience, and location (World Economic Forum). The policy ended salary negotiation for new hires and headed off pay discrimination based on gender (Opensource.com). After ten years, one observer noted that a formula removes person-by-person bias, though gaps between whole job types can remain, and Buffer raised its customer service salaries once it saw how much that work mattered (Ben Werdmuller).

Open pay takes a quiet tool away from the first step of the pattern. A raise cannot be withheld in private, and a favorite cannot be rewarded in private, when everyone can see the formula and the result. When a gap does appear, people can name it and the workplace can fix it in the open.

What Skeptics Will Ask

The first question will be what happens when someone really is not doing the job. Accountability still happens in a trauma-informed workplace, and it happens in the open. Peers mentor the person, a team reviews the work, and a restorative process names the problem with everyone present. No single supervisor controls the outcome, and nobody builds a file in private.

The second question will be whether restorative practice really works inside a large organization. One study of employees at an organization that wrote restorative practice into its policies found that a traditional bureaucracy can bend restorative tools back into the old, legal-style way of doing things (Management Communication Quarterly). That finding is the reason the five practices belong together. Restorative practice holds up only when supervision, reviews, and pay also stop running through one person's hands.

The evidence is still growing. Researchers are only now drafting the first systematic reviews of restorative practice in workplaces (review protocol), and there is no peer-reviewed study of what happens when a workplace ends PIPs. Workplaces that try these practices can help build that evidence.

Bystanders Change the Outcome

The most hopeful finding is that people who learn to see the pattern stop being fooled by it. Jennifer Freyd's research shows that bystanders who know nothing about DARVO tend to be swayed when they watch it happen, and bystanders who learned about it beforehand are much less swayed (APA Monitor interview).

Organizations can learn the same lesson. Freyd uses the term institutional courage for an organization that takes a report seriously, tells the truth about it, and protects the person who spoke up. A 2023 study by Smidt, Adams-Clark, and Freyd found that institutional courage protected employees from the harm of institutional betrayal, protected their health, and strengthened their commitment to the organization after workplace sexual harassment (Freyd publications).

The 2 percent of coworkers who step in today is a starting point. A workplace that teaches its people the three steps, and gives them peer roles and team reviews where they can speak, turns its bystanders into witnesses.

Where I Watched Shared Judgment Work

In 2006 I took a job at the Indianapolis Neighborhood Resource Center, leading the engagement work of the Great Indy Neighborhoods Initiative, the city's quality of life planning process. We built a citywide committee of neighborhood leaders called IMAGINE, and those leaders made the funding decisions. No single program officer decided who got money. A group of neighbors looked at the work together and decided together.

We also built a photovoice evaluation system for the grantees. Photovoice means people take their own photographs and tell their own story about what the pictures show. The people doing the work in their neighborhoods wrote the account of that work, in their own images and their own words. We also brought Public Allies into the initiative, so young leaders worked alongside neighbors as peers.

That work had the same parts this report calls for. Decisions were shared, the people closest to the work told its story, and peers led together. When I think back to the supervisor who talked about me in rooms I was never in, I can picture how different it would have been inside a place like that. My former coworkers would have had a way to speak, a team would have looked at my work, and someone would have asked what happened first. A workplace that can tell a provocation from the reaction to it keeps its people, and trust grows across race.