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Text written by: Renato Santos, Managing Partner of S2 Consultoria.
The aim of this article is to approach the subject respectfully and with the required seriousness, to revere the Yellow September, a suicide prevention campaign that reinforces the need to break the taboo of talking about suicide and, with this, "clarify, raise awareness, stimulate dialogue and open space for campaigns contribute to bringing the subject out of invisibility and thus change this reality of an average of 32 Brazilians who commit suicide every day".
But what is the correlation between harassment within organizations and suicide?
O harassment can be the cause of suicide in some cases! I was once invited to give a talk on Harassment Awareness and Prevention at a certain company and when I presented the slides and texts that would support my presentation, I received a rather unusual request: the event organizer asked me to remove the term suicide from the list of consequences that harassment can generate, claiming that the topic was too heavy for a corporate talk.
I rebutted this argument emphatically and simply: the aim of the talk is to make employees aware of the harm they can cause to people who are victims of their harassment. Failing to talk about the possibility of a harassed person committing suicide is omitting information and distancing ourselves from preventing this behavioral risk.
Yes, people who suffer harassment can look to suicide to relieve the pain of the psychological torture they are suffering in their work environment.
If the harasser is aware that his or her behavior could lead to the harassed person taking his or her own life, he or she will probably be moved to change his or her behavior out of empathy or even fear. That's why it's so important to be transparent when communicating about harassment and its consequences, and not just talk about the financial impact caused by compensation, or even talk only about how harassment affects the organization's motivational climate, without warning about the impact of the greater good: life!
Still with the reverence that the subject demands, I would like to propose a brief reflection on the CORPORATE SUICIDE.
According to the dictionary, suicide is the intentional act of killing oneself. Unfortunately, we have seen many cases where professionals cancel themselves out within the organization they work for as a way of escaping the harassment they are suffering or even observing.
We recently dealt with a case where professionals in one area committed corporate suicide. It happened that the manager of this area began to harass a particular professional out of sheer insecurity, believing that she was 'challenging him' and needed to 'cut off his wings', as he put it. But he chose to practice harassment by means of the famous "refrigerator", in other words, isolating this professional within the area, not calling her to meetings, tasks or even team happy hours. Unlike the manager, the other members of the team had no quarrel with her, but for fear of being labeled 'her little friends' and suffering harassment themselves, they simply decided to cancel themselves out too.
The result: both the harassed professional and the team members committed corporate suicide. They didn't participate as actively as before, they didn't come up with new ideas, they didn't engage with the company's projects, they created a "crib cow" communication with the manager agreeing with everything he said, even in the face of the greatest absurdities, they kept quiet, they annulled themselves. And, as you might expect, the performance of the area as a whole suffered a vertiginous fall.
All of this could have been avoided if the organization had dealt with the issue of harassment in a clearer and more objective way, through awareness-raising talks, setting up anonymous and secure reporting channels, creating consequence policies and, above all, rejecting harassing behavior to the detriment of short-term results. But this is another subject that deserves further study.
Let's prevent suicide in its various forms, not just in September, but all year round, because living is always worth it!
