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---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Borat.Taratuta@ArseKo.cn
Date: Fri, May 4, 2018, 10:17 AM
Subject: Hostile Workplace Environment Warning and Call for Reform!!!
To: Gengis.Khan@ArseKo.cn, Gluteus.Minimus@ArseKo.cn, Zhiang.Zemin@ArseKo.cn, Mingze.Ksi@ArseKo.cn
Cc: ArseKoAll@ArseKo.cn
Bcc:
Good Morning,
I am the Biotronical Engineer for the Arse Robotics division of ArseKo Inc.
Last night at the all hands meeting a new monthly review process was announced that presents a major safety hazard by introducing a policy that will foment a hostile workplace environment. The policy of having peers evaluate each other, and then terminating those with lowest score is extremely dangerous and will inevitably result in workplace mobbing and bullying. This policy in effect forces employees into ganging up on scapegoats and organize into destructive cliques. Victims of these mobbing attacks experience tremendous psychological and even physiological damage to their health. Most are at risk of developing conditioned Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (c-PTSD) and permanent neurological damage due to adrenal failure after being in a high stress environment with constant heightened fight or flight alertness. Verbal assault can lead directly to neurological damage to the part of the brain that houses complex emotional reasoning centers and the body fatigues and organ function is medically depleted by the fear-induced surge of toxic adrenal chemicals.
The workplace can turn into a “battlefield” of abusive “workfare”. Employees often start to sabotage each other, productivity drops and great damage to the bottom line occurs. Making workers vote each other off the island is not a way to organize a successful Unicorn Organisation. Democratic horizontal-structured organizations that encourage dissent, discussion and criticism of managerial decisions have a much better chance of surviving in today’s competitive environment. Dictatorial vertical workplaces tend to descent into toxic office politics, lose their mission and focus and are forced to transform into lower tier ranked design houses that slug along to their inevitable demise. Employees must be free to speak their mind without fear of retribution from vindictive management. Negative feedback stabilizes all systems, this is the foremost principle of engineering design.
Our company’s flagship product is a device that monetizes human attention and focus. In effect we are telling our clients, that they will perform much better if they are allowed to focus on their work. Thus, we cannot continue to ignore the damage to our own work performance from losing focus and concentration having to deal with emotional violence perpetuated by hostile toxic workplace on a daily basis. An actual study performed on two groups of college students perfectly illustrates this effect. Both groups are given an identical test. But one group is made to witness a casual abusive comment from the professor; as part of the experiment, one student arrives a little late and the professor makes a comment to the effect of “Oh you undergrads, you all are always late to class.” The average test score for this group is 20 percent lower then the control group that was not subjected to the toKsic abusive comment. This is the difference between an A grade and a C grade. This is a difference between a successful Unicorn Company and a failed startup that drowns in personal egos of a few abusive supervisors.
Abusing workers does not make them perform better. This is especially true for any mental, non-structured, non-repetitive work, such as engineering, design, marketing etc. You cannot keep beating people over the head and expect them to think better. Professional management focuses on creating a supportive environment that will nurture ideas to involve and empower the employees. Emphasising managing the workplace not the workers. This company goes to great length to recruit remarkable, talented and self-driven individuals. Treating them as mere ditch diggers is not only a disrespectful breach of trust, but is a measurable drain on company’s finances. (Starting an argument about a $1 tube of superglue that take an hour of three engineer’s time, just to assert a supervisor’s authority over lab equipment, is equivalent to taking a few $100 bills from Gengis’s wallet) The turnover and recruitment problems will only increase if this hostile toxic environment is allowed to fester. I was in the process of recruiting one of the best robotic software engineers in the area into our team. After last night’s announcement of such dangerous policies, I cannot in good conscience try to lure anyone into such harassment environment.
The pain and physiological changes from emotional violence are real, even detectable in fMRI studies. Emotional violence imposed by workplace bullies on their captive victims is just as destructive as any other domestic or sexual harassment based on abuse of power. Bullying is a devastating and serious workplace hazard. Psychologically, fear of quitting or getting fired is the same as fear of dying, same buttons must be pushed to compel a human to such a drastic action. This is why real HR professionals shy away from using phrases such as “termination” or “firing”, since this threat not only affects the targeted employee, but also terrorizes any bystanders with unnecessary release of stress and fear hormones. Having our HR supervisor sadistically impose termination policies for breaking petty rules amounts to social predation indicative of Cluster B personality disorder traits.
A pattern of such abuse and harassment has been documented at ArseKo Inc with respect to Arse Robotics team and other ArseKo employees in the past eight months. On multiple occasions Arse Robotics team’s work, professionalism, ethics, integrity and sanity have been ridiculed, reputations smeared and design process and schedules compromised to a point of deliberate sabotage. At this point it is reasonable to assume that we are being targeted for elimination and are being subjected to organized mobbing by the management. Abusers and their enablers will try to deny, downplay and try to smear our reputation in order to deflect this very poignant true criticism. Any denials or belittling of our concerns on the part of the abusive supervisors would confirm the organized nature of this abuse. Thus this requires action from the top. We expect our CEO Dr. Gengis Khan to understand the grave danger this harassment causes to his vision and company’s mission. We know he will conciser this with utmost earnestness, take a serious look at the management dynamics and work with employees to create a much better environment at ArseKo.
In order to attempt to mitigate the damage this harassment and the musical chair policy will inevitably cause, I am compelled to speak out and blow the whistle on Ms. Mingze Ksi, the head of ArseKo HR, as being responsible for policies that promote a toxic environment, endangering ArseKo’s employees health and incurring great costs to ArseKo’s bottom line. Furthermore the abuse and bullying witnessed wreaks havoc with design process and quality control and in the most extreme cases can compromise safety of medical devices we are developing. We spend a lot of effort on establishing quality systems for data storage and medical device certification. When employees are bullied, they are more prone to make errors, are often pressured into cutting corners or even violating safety protocols. Punish the employee later does not rectify problems, and still allows for deadly mistakes to enter the market. Quality control can mitigate some of this, if all we were doing was pumping widgets off an assembly line. But our work is much more involved and not prone to easy metrics. It is much easier to instead to be proactive and strive to create a supportive environment that minimizes any chance for quality issues. If an employee knows that they are not going to be punished (or heck, maybe even rewarded) for bringing forward safety issues, safety issues get addressed before they become problems.
This type of abuse makes no rational business sense, but it is perfectly explained by presence of cluster-B psychiatric disorder traits in abusive supervisors. Ms Ksi has demonstrated a pattern of behaviour consistent with someone suffering from a cluster-B personality disorder. Cluster B disorders are well defined in DSM-5 and psychiatric inventories exist that can help diagnose and treat some of these conditions. But more importantly, we must not neglect the massive psychological trauma that these abusive personalities inflict on their peers and the years of therapy that is often required for their victims and survivors of such narcissistic abuse.
Psychologically normal humans have difficulty understanding why someone would behave like people with these Machiavellian character traits. There is a whole zoo of nomenclatures for narcissistic, anti-social, covert, overt, somatic, histreonic, socio-psychopathic personality disorders. Some are born with atrophied mirror neurons or enlarged amigdala, some acquire these disorders after childhood abuse or spoilage, some just learn to imitate abusers and suppress what little empathy they happen to possess. We’ll leave the classification and diagnoses to psychiatric professionals. In a nutshell:
-People with Cluster B personality disorders have no empathy or conscience. Acting in a moral way is seen by them as weak and predictable. This is their main weapon, people rarely expect their fellow humans to act with such vile malice. Psycho-normal humans possess empathy and conscience, these eat away at our well being if we commit immoral acts. This negative feedback allows psycho-normal humans to coexist in peace.
-People with Cluster B personality disorders see every human interaction as an animalistic competition. This way they are not only incapable of seeing win-win scenarios, they actively work to target and eliminate anyone who does. Any horizontal organizational structure is abhorrent to them, they organize the world into a pecking order.
-Their entire existence revolves around feeding a false “god-like” ego they can never live up to. So they lash out and try to eliminate anything or anyone that might threaten that “god-like” image they work so hard to delude themselves and others into believing.
What’s left is an adult human, full of dirty tricks for manipulating their surroundings to acquire power. But with emotional maturity of a toddler, getting sadistic pleasure from abusing those they deem “a less than”. When such individuals are identified through a pattern of abusive behavior or other red flags, it is our responsibility to point them out and try to get help for them and their victims.
I have been suffering from symptoms consistent with c-PTSD from being subjected to harassment from abusive supervisors, such as insomnia, anxiety, panic attacks other physiological effects that I would rather keep private. I am sure others experience similar stress related symptoms. We’ve already had interns that developed tendencies to see everyone as undermining them, others had to go to the hospital following anxiety attacks. These are all red flags that professional management is trained to recognize and take action before the toxic environment infects the entire workplace.
I must declare and institute a personal policy of minimal to no-contact with supervisors that have shown a documented pattern of behavior consistent with harassment of myself and other Arse Robotics team members; Ms. Mingze Ksi, Mr. Zhiang Zemin and Mr. Lei Feng. All three have on multiple occasions engaged in well documented abuse, bullying and gaslighting and at this point interacting with them is dangerous for my health. Since all three take no active part in the Arse Robotics project, there should be no interference with my ability to perform my work. In fact I predict that my performance will only improve as a healthy workplace environment is established.
Having called them out for bullying I expect them to attack me with utmost ferocity and attempt to seek my termination in retaliation. I’m not naïve, Sicong, but the truth is the truth. And truth is the ultimate source of power. Eliminating me will not eliminate the hostile work environment my criticism is trying to address. And my physical presence in the office is not necessary to keep speaking truth to power and exposing abusive supervisors. Come at me bro... If you dare.
There are many ways forward that we can use to improve our company’s workplace and culture. This issue is not new and lots of guidance and resources are available for organizational and personal help. Please try to find some time and research workplace bullying, mobbing and dealing with abuse by ClusterB supervisors to help minimize any psychological trauma resulting from the harassment. There are a couple pdfs with organizational suggestions attached, example anti-bullying policies and explanations of this phenomenon. We can start to implement these today. Or we can bury our heads in the sand and start playing musical chairs of termination. Which will make us a Unicorn company as envisioned?
There is a lot of information available to victims of workplace bullying and mobbing abuse to make them understand what is happening and provide therapeutic and healing resources:
https://www.overcomebullying.org/mobbing.html
http://flyingmonkeysdenied.com/
https://nobullying.com/mobbing-in-the-workplace/
http://www.workplacebullying.org/
http://bullyonline.org/
It’s important to note that individuals who report coming into contact with such a person, whether in a professional, social, familial, or workplace setting typically benefit from reading self-help literature about Narcissistic Abuse, noting that all Cluster B personalities have a tendency to use, abuse, or in some way physically or socially harm others during times when they behave in ways that go against empathy norms. Now lets go do our homework… and remember — self care is NOT being selfish. Narcissistic Abuse recovery IS possible. Education is key. Tell everybody.
People with Cluster B personality disorders can only thrive when victims and community members remain silent. Be the change in the world YOU want to see.
“The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.” -A. Einstein
There are legislative efforts centered right here in Boston to make this type of harassment as illegal as any other power abuse like sexual harassment or domestic abuse. I am in contact with Professor David Yamada at Suffolk University Law School, who has written this legislation and has been leading this fight for over a decade now. I encourage others to contact him and offer support and testimony to help lawmakers demonstrate the pressing need for this legislation to protect employees. The main obstacle is lobbying from HR and Industrial Employers associations to keep abusive supervisors safe from their victims. Similar to how early 20th century surgeons kept denying that not washing their hands before operations killed their patients thru toxic shock. Admitting this would expose the docs to tremendous legal liability. So they kept their hands dirty, and the patients kept dying. This is the essence of violations of professional ethics.
http://healthyworkplacebill.org/
http://mahealthyworkplace.com/
I have been very ill all week and was just informed that there was a death in my family. I will take that one personal day that I have accrued and will not be in the office today. If I am terminated in retaliation for blowing the whistle on this abuse, it has been a great pleasure working with all of you, I only wish we could have the healthy environment we deserve and require to accomplish our challenging goals. I am very close by and will be happy to talk to help anyone else dealing with the consequences of workplace harassment.
BT
--
Borat Taratuta
Biotronical Engineer | at Arse Robotics
A 121 Bacon St. STE 501, Somerville, MA, 02143
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Mingze.Ksi@ArseKo.cn
Date: Mon, May 7, 2018, 10:16 AM
Subject: Re: Hostile Workplace Environment Warning and Call for Reform!!!
To: Gengis.Khan@ArseKo.cn, Borat.Taratuta@ArseKo.cn
Cc:
Bcc:
Dear Borat,
I'm following up on the previous email and wondering what time works for you this week to have an in person meeting. I would love to discuss and answer your questions and concerns of the issues you mentioned above. Thank you very much!
Sincerely,
Mingze Ksi
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Borat Taratuta <Borat.Taratuta@ArseKo.cn>
Date: Mon, May 7, 2018, 11:08 AM
Subject: Re: Hostile Workplace Environment Warning and Call for Reform!!!
To: Mingze.Ksi@ArseKo.cn, Gengis.Khan@ArseKo.cn,
Cc:
Bcc:
Hi Mingze,
I am very serious about the no contact policy with the three supervisors who display clear red flags of abusive behavior. This is dangerous for our health, even a casual conversation is filled with covert abuse that harms our physical and psychological health. (Well documented pattern of abusive behavior with the three supervisors called out). This is to protect ourselves and hopefully to help these abusive supervisors get the help they and those close to them require. Mingze, its very hard for most abusive people to accept it, but that is precisely how we all view our abusers. There is help but first you guys need to admit the problem (and not blame the messenger). Please refrain from contacting me by email or in person at the office.
Thanks,
BT
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Mingze.Ksi@ArseKo.cn
Date: Mon, May 7, 2018, 11:32 AM
Subject: Re: Hostile Workplace Environment Warning and Call for Reform!!!
To: Gengis.Khan@ArseKo.cn, Borat.Taratuta@ArseKo.cn
Cc:
Bcc:
Dear Borat,
I understand your concerns, and Gengis will talk with you instead.
While as the representative of the HR department, I need to face and solve the problem anyway. It is my responsibility to make sure the company workplace safety. Moreover, you are the best electrical engineer we have ever hired and you made great contribution to the BrainRobotics team. We do want you and your team feel comfort and happy working either in office or from home.
I hope you are feeling better now and be careful with the weather change. And I feel very sorry about your family lose. The company and your team is always here to support whenever you have a need.
Sincerely,
Mingze Ksi
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