View of the Boston Common and the Park Street Church, from our meeting room at Suffolk U Law School in downtown Boston

From last Wednesday through Saturday, I had the pleasure of bringing together in Boston a remarkable group of friends and colleagues for some in-depth conversations about the past, present, and future of the workplace anti-bullying movement and the work that we’ve been doing as part of it.

This gathering was rather improvised, and the final schedule didn’t come together until right before the out-of-towners arrived in Boston. It was precipitated by a decision to move the Nov. 2023 Work, Stress, and Health Conference (WSH) to an online format, a switch from original plans to host it as an in-person event. This biennial conference — co-sponsored by the American Psychological Association, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and Society for Occupational Health Psychology — has long been one of my favorite events. My experiences at WSH in 2015, for example, moved me to write a blog article, “Conferences as community builders” (link here).

To Boston

My biggest disappointment about WSH’s switch to the online format was that I wouldn’t get to spend quality, in-person time with my fellow presenters. The pandemic had prevented many of us from being together for some time. (The last in-person WSH Conference was in November 2019, months before everything changed.) Over the years, during shared meals and chats between sessions, these conferences have allowed us to share ideas and suggest possible collaborations in ways that Zoom events don’t easily provide.

But then I came up with the idea of inviting my fellow panelists to Boston, where we could create our own little workshop. This would include mixing our online participation in the WSH Conference with some reflective, in-person discussions about the work we’ve been doing and hope to do. We could add in meals together and a few social events. I also saw this as an opportunity to invite some local workplace anti-bullying activists to join us for a session.

Our group included:

• Attorney Ellen Pinkos Cobb, author of global surveys of workplace bullying and harassment laws and a recent volume on psychosocial work hazards;
• Dr. Maureen Duffy, preeminent authority on workplace mobbing behaviors and co-author of leading books on mobbing and related behaviors;
• Dr. Gary Namie, director and co-founder, Workplace Bullying Institute;
• Dr. Ruth Namie, co-founder, Workplace Bullying Institute; and,
• Dr. Kathleen Rospenda, U. of Illinois/Chicago psychology professor and pioneering researcher on the health harms of sexual harassment and generalized harassment (i.e., bullying) at work.

Prompted by a suggestion from Kathy Rospenda, we spent big chunks of our four days together discussing the history, present state, and potential future of this work. We were especially attentive to how we, as veterans among this community of researchers, educators, practitioners, and advocates, could maximize our potential contributions during the years to come. By my estimation, our discussions enveloped a collective 135+ years of experience in addressing various aspects of workplace abuse and mistreatment — via academic research and writing, therapy and coaching, organizational consulting, legal and legislative advocacy, and public education.

As the de facto moderator of our workshop, I suggested that we frame our discussions around a SWOT analysis, an evaluative tool that involves analyzing an entity’s (S)trengths, (W)eaknesses, (O)pportunities, and (T)hreats. It turned out to be an excellent way to tease out broad themes, specific details, and unrecognized patterns — some tracing back for over 25 years. Our conversations culminated in identifying concrete areas where each of us can focus our efforts. During the months to come, you’ll be reading about some of these initiatives here.

On Friday, we were joined by five individuals who are playing leadership roles in addressing workplace bullying in their respective domains here in the Bay State:

• Susan Rohrbach (Co-Coordinator, MA Healthy Workplace Advocates);
• Brittany Tuttle (Steering Committee, MA Healthy Workplace Advocates);
• Rich Couture (President, American Federation of Government Employees, Council 215);
• Jessica Lapointe (President, American Federation of Government Employees Council 220); and,
• Steven Lawrence (Professor, Benjamin Franklin Cummings Institute of Technology).