Ho Ho No: A holiday bevy of bullying and bad boss stories

Well folks, ’tis the season. For workplace bullies and toxic bosses, I mean. This year’s top Scrooge may well be Vishal Garg, CEO of Better.com, who used a Zoom call last week to lay off the 900 workers who were summoned to be on the call. As reported by Samantha Lock for the Guardian (link here):

The chief executive of a US mortgage company has drawn criticism after he reportedly fired 900 employees on a Zoom call.

“I come to you with not great news,” Vishal Garg, CEO of Better.com, is heard saying at the beginning of the video call made on Wednesday last week. Footage of the call was widely circulated on social media.

“If you’re on this call, you are part of the unlucky group being laid off. Your employment here is terminated effective immediately,” Garg continued, citing changes in the market, “efficiency” and “productivity” as the reasons behind the mass termination.

Word of the layoffs-by-Zoom went viral, and public reaction was harsh. As reported by Emma Goldberg for the New York Times (link here):

Better.com’s mercurial chief executive, Vishal Garg, faced swift backlash for his decision to fire more than 900 employees on a Zoom call last week. The mortgage lender’s board announced in a memo sent to staff on Friday that Mr. Garg was “taking time off” after the “very regrettable events.”

Goldberg goes on to interview one of the laid off workers about the experience of being on the Zoom call:

Christian Chapman, 41, a former underwriting trainer at Better.com, said he was used to preparing for company meetings by making sure his children weren’t around, because Mr. Garg tended to use foul language. But last Wednesday, when he received an unexpected invitation to the company call with Mr. Garg, he got a sense of foreboding because the chief executive looked so solemn.

As Mr. Garg impassively delivered the news, Mr. Chapman said his “gut dropped to the floor,” and he tried to message teammates to ask what was happening but his computer access was shut off almost immediately.

…On Thursday, the company increased his termination package from one to two months of pay. He also received a Christmas package containing a trophy, certificate and company T-shirt (which his wife offered to burn).

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Vishal Garg is but one among many examples of awful workplace behavior. For more, BuzzFeed has done roundups of stories about workplace bullies and horrific bosses:

• 15 Toxic Workplace Bullies Who Should Be Banned From Working With Other Humans (BuzzFeed, via Yahoo! Life) (link here)
• 19 Horrific Bosses in 2021 That Made People Say, “Screw It — I’m Working From Home Forever (BuzzFeed, via Yahoo! Life) (link here)

“Members Who Inspire” profile in ABA Journal

The latest issue of the ABA Journal, the membership magazine of the American Bar Association, includes a generous profile of my work on workplace bullying and on therapeutic jurisprudence, as the latest in its “Members Who Inspire” series. You may access an online version of the article by Amanda Robert, “David Yamada is fighting to end workplace bullying,” by going here.

In addition, the ABA Journal invited me to contribute a short sidebar advice piece for legal employers on how to address workplace bullying. You may access “6 ways to fight workplace bullying in legal spaces” here.

I am grateful for Amanda Robert’s feature article and laudatory comments in the piece from Dr. Gary Namie (co-founder of the Workplace Bullying Institute) and Prof. David Wexler (co-founder of the field of therapeutic jurisprudence), two long-time dear colleagues whose pioneering work has inspired mine.

Music as therapy

My morning routine usually involves clicking around to a lot of newspapers and news sites to assess the state of things. I’m pretty good at understanding that typical daily news coverage is going to emphasize conflicts, challenges, and problems. But today’s flyover underscored my feeling that our chances to get things right are dwindling on so many levels.

In search of a positive mood fix, I went to YouTube in search of my favorite music video, that of the incomparable British pianist Jack Gibbons playing his singularly brilliant rendition of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” (link here). It’s fourteen sublime minutes. I have played this video — or favorite parts of it — countless dozens of times, and it never fails to bring my spirit into a different, better space.

I am hardly alone in recognizing the therapeutic gifts of music. As explained on one health care site (link here):

“Across the history of time, music has been used in all cultures for healing and medicine,” explains health psychologist Shilagh Mirgain, PhD. “Every culture has found the importance of creating and listening to music. Even Hippocrates believed music was deeply intertwined with the medical arts.”

Scientific evidence suggests that music can have a profound effect on individuals – from helping improve the recovery of motor and cognitive function in stroke patients, reducing symptoms of depression in patients suffering from dementia, even helping patients undergoing surgery to experience less pain and heal faster. And of course, it can be therapeutic.

So, if you find your spirits flagging for any reason, then you might try listening to — or even singing or performing — some of your favorite music. It may not change the extant circumstances that sent you into a bluer state, but it might help to lift you out of it.

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P.S. Oh, and a story about Jack Gibbons. For years I had said that one of my time travel fantasies would be to find myself in the New York City concert hall where Gershwin first performed “Rhapsody in Blue” in 1924. In 1998, I was attending a continuing legal education program in Oxford, England, and saw a poster promoting a Gibbons concert featuring Gershwin music. I was unfamiliar with Gibbons at the time, but I bought myself a ticket. Was I in for a treat?! His finishing number at the end of this glorious concert was “Rhapsody in Blue.” I told friends that I now know what it felt like to hear Gershwin perform it back in 1924.