Topic : Workplace Bullies

I work in a group home with clients with disabilities.

My supervisor hired her daughter n law to this home.  She puts me to train her daughter n law, which she should be training new hires to begin with.  I find out 5 minutes before my shift starts, that I was working with her daughter n law.  The shift i work, is the busiest shift of the day. 

I got anxious when I found out that I was suppose to train her.  The supervisor told us staff that 2 fully trained staff would work and when a new hire was being trained, that new trained to be staff would just observe what the 2 trained staff are doing.

Well, didnt happen that way. 

I got written up for having this new hire pass meds, which i was not suppose to let her do. 

And, then this daughter n law goes back to my supervisor, which is her mother n law and tells her that I said a bunch of stuff that I did not say.

A few days later other staff that I work with found a paper written up on me that said that I wasnt suppose to let her pass meds and that I was rude and said awful things to this person. 

A month has passed and the supervisor has not yet confronted me about the situation on what her daughter n law had said about me. 

I now find out that her daughter n law is being trained in another home in the same company and has rumors going around in that house, that me and another staff on my shift will be getting fired.

Am I suppose to ignore all this. 

Its got me and other staff on pins and needles at work now.

And neither me or the other staff don't understand any of this.  Why we would be fired.

We have not been confronted or anything. 

Is this right?  I'm totally confused on this matter.

 And gossiping is totally out in the homes.  Do you think our supervisor is setting us staff up.  If we go to her and tell her about what her daughter n law is saying about us.  We will get written up from her, for gossiping.

Hope someone has some good advice for me out their.

I was working in a group home as an Assistant Administrator.  Yes, the things that go on in Healthcare are serious. We are paid to take care of these people with disabilities. Sometime we have to make quick decisions and we pay for our wrong judgments. Yes, I was "Fired" for protecting the person that gave meds the morning before; I called in a relief staff person to cover a.m. shift so that I would not have to work a 12 hour day. This person came in for me and was willing to pass the a.m. meds. She calls me up to tell me that the med count was off on 3 medications. I told her to give the a.m. meds and I will be in later to go over the drug audit sheets to check the count. Yes, the count was off.  Someone the day before must not have given the med.  No one would have known, if this one certain person who was mad at me, (over heard what happened) and reported me to Management. I did not deny what I did. I told the truth!

This person that turned me in, was mad at me for not apologizing to her for something I said; (She told everyone she wanted an apology from me) I told her no. (This made her turn on me the next day) reported that I destroyed the 3 meds (not controlled meds).

Yes, I have seen so much that goes on in group homes, I can say that.; "I tried my hardest to keep my staff that I worked with happy and to always keep my clients; clean, fed, and happy". I always gave it my very best.  I felt that my clients should be treated like I would want to be treated and that was the way I supervised". I never made my staff do anything that I would not do.

SETTING STAFF UP: Is so common in the group homes, it happens when a "click" does not like a fellow staff member --they get you good.  Sometimes Managers help the staff set up an employee.

The Agencies that run these group homes have the largest turn over of employees. This makes it very hard on the clients due to the fact that the clients are comfortable with a staff person and then they leave them. Anyone doing this type of work knows that people with special needs are people that follow routines in their life. If you should change their routine, they become very upset or violent and may even injure themselves.  These Agencies hire people that just want to do the job for the money and there is no bonding with the clients at all.  I always treated my clients like my children, I felt close to them. I still miss them very much and hope they can be happy.

Gossiping is one of the worst offences that can happy in a single group home. The ones that start the gossiping are the ones working at setting someone up. This is one of the ways and powers of evil that goes on.  The other is "lying no will confess that they made a mistake, or did any thing wrong, because management has such strict rules, it forces staff to lie to protect their job. Other times management can be very lax in rules for some and again strict with others. So we have sets rules for some and another set of rules for others.

My suggestion to you is switch to another house, or start looking for other employment, because your feelings maybe telling you something! "Go with your feelings"  I didn't and I got fired.

I'm going to share with you a letter that I wrote complaining about a bully.  I'm changing all the names.  Now, this was a big company with proper rules in place to deal with this sort of thing, but it all depends on who you have to report to.  The person I wrote the letter to was then my supervisor, and I can tell you he was not happy I wrote it and didn't follow up to tell me what, if anything, would be done.  Me and my partner, who is the one I call Andy, tape-recorded the meeting with him, also.  You should know that one thing that made me so mad about this Rainman incident was that my partner Andy actually was sort of slow, so there wasn't one thing funny about the bully's comments.  While my supervisor did as little as possible and no changes were made, he soon left the company and as fate would have it, the bully's supervisor became my boss.  I believe it was at that time that something was done about it, but I was never sure why, if he just then saw the complaint or if he met me and knew I wasn't a wingnut.  At any rate, they kept the Bully away from me entirely for a full year and I believe they probably sent him to anger management, because he never hardly spoke with me again, which was fine with me.  They didn't, however, fire him, which is stupid.  Anyway, the letter is self explanatory. 

Dear Supervisor, 

          I have a serious problem with Technician "Napoleon Complex" which I think you should know about since it undoubtedly either has affected other first-line staff or will affect them in the future. 

          I remember that during our training, you told us that basically the technicians were not under your control and to be nice to them.  That is why I haven’t spoken up until now about this problem, but I feel must say something now because I don’t think anyone should be expected to put up with this sort of behavior.  I can’t imagine why a respectable institution such as Bank Delux has tolerated his behavior this long. 

          To sum it up, Napoleon has an anger-management problem.  He frequently gets very angry and yells loudly at myself and my partner Andy.  During his yelling episodes, he gets up in your face, makes very insulting comments in a nonhumorous tone, slams things around,  goes on prolonged personal philosophical tirades about “harnassing the power,” and sometimes outright lies.  If you don’t bow down right away and hang your head in submission, his tirade escalates.  After the first couple of episodes of this behavior, I made some discreet inquiries and found out that Napoleon has a reputation for his anger and was told that his anger has turned to violence in the past.  His bad temper is common knowledge. 

A few weeks ago, Napoleon was showing us how to do something, and as he lectured while we stood quietly listening, his anger escalated until he was yelling and waving his arms around and finally said in a very nasty tone, “I guess I’m going to have to get a chalk board and draw you two a picture.”  We were fairly new at that point and admittedly didn’t  know everything.  However, I remember his nasty insult coming out of the blue, unprovoked by any physical or verbal action on our part.  It was just the comment that ended his tirade, and I felt that we had very little to do with it at all.   

Napoleon routinely yells that he has shown us a certain procedure before.  Sometimes he has, and sometimes he hasn’t at all.  I will say that when Napoleon is “explaining” procedures while yelling and displaying his anger and hurling insults, it is very difficult to concentrate on what he’s saying because his behavior is so overwhelming and out of context compared to the subject matter. 

April 5, we arrived at #111 on a printer default.  Upon arrival, I noticed that one of the printer covers was lying loose in the machine, as well as two of the four screws from the printer head cover.  We worked on clearing the jam and got it to run a few receipts, but it broke again, at which time we disassembled it, put it back together and tried it again; but it still jammed.  We cleared the jams again, put the printer mask back on as a last-ditch effort, knowing it would probably not stay, and then I went inside the branch to answer a page.  When I returned, Andy had tried to run the printer and it was again jammed up and Napoleon had arrived to work on another machine inside the branch.   

I told him about the printer cover and screws being off.  He told us we knocked it off and that’s why the machine was jamming.  I told him that wasn’t true, that it was off when we arrived (and of course, the machine was already jamming before we were paged out on it, so it was a ridiculous accusation anyway).  Napoleon went on an at least 30-minute tirade about us not knowing how to clear a printer jam.  He went through the steps again, yelling the entire time.  He forbade me to agree with him as he was yelling by saying “uh-huh,” “okay,” or “right,” which I was only doing to let him know I was listening, like anyone would do, and also in hopes that knowing I was listening would calm him down.  He made a lot of personally insulting remarks about my saying “okay” and “right,” such as “See, your partner here is standing there nodding her head and saying yeah, okay, but she’s obviously not listening because I’ve shown you both how to do this a million times.”  Then, still yelling, he launched into what can only be called a strange philosophical tirade about harnassing power, which seemed basically to serve to illustrate that he had harnassed it and we hadn’t.  As I say, this episode went on for quite some time.  At some point during his loud critique of our abilities, he referred to us as “Rainman,”  the idiot savant from the movie “Rainman.”  It was not done in a joking tone.  It was in the context of  “y’all stand there like Rainman…” 

During this incident, I simply stood quietly and agreed with him when possible and until I was told to quit and had offered the information about the printer cover and screws.  When he said we had broken the printer by knocking off the printer cover, I did tell him that was not true.  Andy was very quiet. 

During Napoleon's “demonstration,” he did not do anything to the printer that we hadn’t done prior to his arrival, although there’s no contest that he did it better and faster.  Afterwards, I phoned to put us in travel for our next call.  Napoleon told us to stay there and help him work on the machine inside.  About 30 minutes later, while we were working on it, 111’s printer jammed again and Napoleon's Toadie [a different tech who sucked up to Napoleon arrived to work on it.  Napoleon told Toadie that I had gone and knocked the printer cover off after me twice telling him it was like that upon arrival.  It was about 1700 when I left 111.  A little after 1800, 111 was paged out again on the same printer fault.  It had jammed again.  Toadie said he didn’t know what was wrong with it, that he needed to replace the printer.  We were yelled at and insulted by Napoleon for 30 minutes about not fixing a printer that neither of the techs were able to fix either. 

In addition to these incidents with me (and other less dramatic but still uncalled-for behavior), I have twice seen Napoleon be confrontational with bank customers wanting inside the branch after hours, telling them in pointed or curt tones that the bank was closed when no face-to-face interaction was necessary.  

I know Bank Delux needs technicians and that they certainly need an experienced tech a lot worse than they need me, but I can’t help but think that they would have better luck hanging onto its first-line people if they weren’t asked to submit and tolerate Napoleon’s reprehensible conduct.  In my 30 years of work experience, I have never worked anywhere that condoned this sort of behavior.  I have witnessed an isolated outburst or two in my years (everyone has a bad day every now and then), but never have I seen any company ask employees to tolerate verbal abuse on an ongoing basis.   

I was hoping that someone else would speak up about this before I felt I had to so that I wouldn’t be perceived as a complainer, but this situation is so extreme that I don’t feel I should try to wait it out.  I am simply unwilling to quietly subject myself to another day of bullying.    

I have provided extra copies of this letter for you to distribute to Napoleon’s supervisor and other appropriate personnel.  Please advise me of what actions you will take or any further action you need for me to take to resolve this matter.  Don’t ask me to confront Napoleon on these issues outside the presence of you or some other supervisor because he is too out of control.  Sorry to trouble you with this unpleasant business. 

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