Why You Gotta Be So Mean? The Impact of Cyberbullying in the Workplace

I’m sure everyone has experienced at least one instance of bullying by email, text, or Facebook. It’s a lot easier to be mean to someone when they’re not standing in front of you, and with the increasing use of technology as a means of mainstream communication, we’re seeing a rise in horrible conduct – and not just by adolescents. It’s also happening in the workplace.

Industrial Safety & Hygiene News reports that nearly 20 percent of U.S. workers experience bullying in the workplace and 19 percent witness it, according to a national survey conducted by the Workplace Bullying Institute (WBI). The survey defined workplace bullying as “repeated mistreatment of an employee by one or more employees; abusive conduct that is: threatening, humiliating, or intimidating, work sabotage, or verbal abuse.” Although the WBI survey was conducted in 2017, the problem has not abated; in a 2019 Monster.com survey, nearly 94 percent out of responding employees reported being bullied in the workplace.

I’ll never forget an incident a few years ago with a senior executive who had a reputation for passive-aggressive behavior and who became upset by my email response on some issue. She responded angrily in ALL CAPS for several paragraphs (and included several other executives on her response), and I still remember the awful feeling in the pit of my stomach over the interaction. This person was clearly “yelling” at me, and when I responded by pointing this out (privately of course), the CAPS and the language in the next response became even more furious. I finally made the trip up a couple of floors to speak directly to her and talk the issue out like adults.

Why does ALL CAPS come across as shouting? Professor Paul Luna, Director of the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the UK’s University of Reading, said, “All-capitals provide visibility—maximum size within a given area, and that works online, too. All-caps in an email looks like shouting because when someone is shouting, you’re aware of the shout, and not the nuance,” Luna continued. “ALL-CAPS FILL THE SPACE, so there’s an element of feeling that the message is crowding out everything else.”

In Writing in All Caps Is Like Shouting, Heinz Tschabitscher says, “Whether composing an email, a text, or an instant message, it’s usually best to use sentence capitalization, which means don’t use all caps. The reason is that, when you write in all capital letters, recipients interpret it as the equivalent of shouting.”

Other online sources report that there could be additional negative assumptions coming from the use of ALL CAPS, including:

• People assume that the writer is trying to demand attention;
• People may assume that you have a lack of skill with technology;
• People may assume that you are an immature writer;
• People may assume that you are lazy;
• People may wonder if you are trying to be a rebel.

And if this weren’t enough, according to Miles Tinker, renowned for his landmark work, Legibility of Print, using ALL CAPS inhibits the reader’s ability to effectively digest the information one is trying to convey:

“All-capital print greatly retards speed of reading in comparison with lower-case type. Also, most readers judge all capitals to be less legible.”

And finally, Yonothan Arbel and Andrew Toler, whose recent white paper is the first to empirically examine the effectiveness of all-caps, found that “all-caps fails to appreciably improve consent. Moreover, some preliminary evidence suggests that all-caps is harmful to older consumers. Based on these findings and other evidence reported here, the paper lays out the dangers and risks of continued reliance on all-caps and calls for abandoning all-caps.”

I know first hand that following the ALL CAPS email onslaught I received from that senior executive, I avoided future contact with her when and if at all possible. And I spent a fair amount of time discussing with colleagues how to effectively handle the situation and move forward. This is really unfortunate since she was one of the brightest and savviest executives I have ever known – but that point was completely lost by the approach she took to giving me feedback.

A loss for the company, and a great lesson for employers.