Guide to Preventing and Responding to Bullying in the Workplace

The extent of the workplace bullying problem

How widespread is workplace bullying? Systemic underreportingⁱ  makes the precise figure difficult to determine; researchers at the University of South Australia qualify that only ten per cent of workers self-identify as victims of workplace bullying. Despite that, the remaining data suggests that bullying in the workplace is not just widespread but becoming ever more commonplace.

Indeed, Safe Work Australia revealed that the number of serious workplace injuries related to bullying and harassment nearly doubled over the course of the 2010s^ii. International studies place Australia as the sixth-highest offender of workplace bullying, compared to the 31 European countries also measuredⁱⁱⁱ. 

The cost of workplace bullying

These figures are troubling. For employers, specifically, they should come as a wake-up call. After all, workplace bullying erodes the bottom line.

By how much? A 2018 Productivity Commission report showed that workplace bullying costs the national economy up to AUD 36 billion every year^iv.

Workplace bullying is one of the leading causes of work-related mental stress. That stress often contributes to decreased morale and productivity, higher turnover and early retirement payouts, as well as loss of reputation for firms when reports of bullying and harassment leak out.

The research, here, confirms the deleterious effect bullying has on workplace productivity and engagement. According to the Australian Human Rights Commission^v, bullied workers tend to be:

• Less active or successful 
• Less confident in their work
• Feel scared, stressed, anxious, or depressed
• Have life outside of work affected, e.g., study and relationships
• Want to stay away from work
• Feel like they can’t trust their employer or the people with whom they work
• Lack confidence and happiness about themselves and their work
• Have physical signs of stress, e.g., headaches, backaches, sleep problems

What’s more, workplace bullying is a legal issue for organisations. Employers have a common law duty to take reasonable care of the health and safety of their employees. That duty is breached when bullying or harassment (including sexual harassment) occurs within the workplace; and it is the victim’s perception that is the relevant factor when assessing claims.

When bullying is proven, a victim can seek remediation by applying to the Fair Work Commission for a stop order. If bullying behaviour leads to workplace injury (e.g., psychiatric illness), the victim can lodge a workers’ compensation claim. 

Practical recommendations for preventing workplace bullying

With the costs so steep, what is it that employers can do to prevent workplace bullying? Though employers might understand the colloquial definition of bullying, they will also need to master the legal definition of workplace bullying before attempting to stamp it out. 

According to the Fair Work Act, bullying constitutes repeated unreasonable behaviour that creates risk to an employee’s health and safety. Further statutory definitions follow below:

Of course, it is simply not enough to understand the statutory definitions. Bullying rarely occurs in isolation from wider organisational factors. In fact, workplace bullying is typically symptomatic of those wider organisational factors – often cultural and safety issues likely to be dragging down productivity and increasing risk, as well. 

As such, employers as well as deputised HR and Safety leaders will need to be on the lookout for the specific factors likeliest to enable bullying cultures to develop. Factors to monitor^vi include:

• Working hours
• How entitlements are coordinated
• Performance management
• Clear roles and allocated tasks and workloads
• Sufficient training
• Career opportunities
• How performance is monitored and appraised
• How environment and relationships are developed in the office
• Mental health culture 

Developing a mentally healthy workplace

Mental health stands out. In the literature, it is clear that developing a mentally healthy workplace is a vital precondition for preventing the emergence of workplace bullying. The outstanding question for most organisations is how to do so. 

Here, it is helpful to develop practices and values that align with the attributes of mentally healthy workplaces. According to research in this space^vii, those specific attributes include:

• Job design. Demands of the job, control in the work environment, resources provided, the level of work engagement, the characteristics of the job, and potential exposure to trauma.
• Team/group factors. Support from colleagues and managers, the quality of interpersonal relationships, effective leadership, and the availability of manager training.
• Organisational factors. Changes to the organisation, support from the organisation, recognising and rewarding work, how justice is perceived in an organisation, a psychosocial safety climate, positive organisational climate, and a safe physical environment.
• Home/work conflict. The degree to which conflicting demands from home, including significant life events, interfere with work.
• Individual biopsychosocial factors. Genetics, personality, early life events, cognitive and behavioural patterns, mental health history, lifestyle factors and coping style.

Senior leadership must also be involved and committed to supporting the necessary mental health and wellbeing programs that would make a meaningful dent in workplace bullying.

To do so, leadership will have to deputise wellbeing committees comprised of representatives from Safety and HR who will go out and conduct situational analyses of the current state of mental health and wellbeing in the workplace. The specific measurement tools available to such committees are likely to include data coming from or related to:

• Sickness absence
• Work-related psychological injuries
• Return to work rates
• Exit interviews
• Staff turnover rates
• Audits of existing mental health policies and procedures
• Focus groups of employees
• Surveys of employee engagement
• Audits of existing leadership and management training
• Examinations of the mental health strategies of similar organisations
• External expert advice and best practices from psychologically healthy workplace programs
• Recognition of upcoming organisational change

Gathering and synthesising that data is step one. Wellbeing committees will then have to abstract from the data, identifying and implementing the appropriate bullying intervention strategies for the workplace. 

Organisations shouldn’t simply implement these interventions without follow up, though. Committees must also review outcomes and adjust intervention strategies as the data dictates. 

What might workplace mental health strategies and tangible actions look like? According to the best-practice literature^viii, they might look like the following: 

The role of digital technology in operationalising your mental health and wellbeing program

What about the start-up costs of getting such a best-practice program operationalised? Clearly, organisations can’t afford to belabour implementation and tracking, especially now with workplace bullying on the steep rise.

Here, digital wellbeing management technologies can help businesses (1) respond to mental health and wellbeing events, (2) implement and track proactive initiatives to support their personnel, as well as (3) better understand the opportunities for mental health and wellbeing improvement to ward off systemic bullying. What capabilities to look out for? The following come to mind: 

• Gain situational awareness of current events impacting on personnel through live weather, Twitter, and pandemic feeds
• Broadcast communications to distributed personnel in seconds using email, SMS, or voice
• Conduct a welfare checks at scale enabling personnel to respond via email, SMS, or voice and triage the response to events
• Push surveys to personnel to understand how they are coping before, during, and after events
• Launch initiatives with templates that take the heavy lifting out of creation and implementation
• Customise initiatives based on current events or unique organisational requirements
• Schedule periodic working from home ergonomic assessments for distributed staff
• Enable personnel to request mental health and wellbeing support
• Direct personnel to support programs and best-practice content
• Securely store personnel information in a single solution or import from your HR Software

Besides that, the platforms in question provide tools for all levels of the organisation weighing in on workplace bullying questions; executives can oversee events and analytics; line managers can manage events and launch initiatives with centralised dashboards; and staff can access tools and participate in initiatives on any device.

Benefits of digital wellbeing management technology 

• Integrated with safety management software to reduce start-up costs and increase efficiency
• Reduce the risk of injuries and illness in your organisation
• Reduce churn by providing better supports to personnel 
• Understand how personnel are coping with traumatic events 
• Increase resilience by providing tools for personnel to grow in their work and personal life
• Monitor organisational morale across your organisation
• Draw insights into which initiatives add the most value
• Effective spend of Mental health and Wellbeing budgets to deliver on organisational targets

Finally, workplace bullying erodes the productivity of employees while creating liability and reputational hazards for employers. In conjunction with the wider mental health and wellbeing crisis, the bullying epidemic has also exacerbated safety risk for employers. 

Organisations can continue to dismiss the threat at their doorsteps, or they can act to protect their bottom lines. Action means putting in place coherent mental health and wellbeing strategies to prevent bullying from flourishing. Testing those strategies, though, requires digital wellbeing management technologies, housed in safety management platforms. In addition to monitoring for continuing improvement, these technologies can cut down start-up costs and provide better supports for personnel, while reducing churn and boosting productivity.

Citations

i. Michael Quinlan, Business Think: Why is workplace bullying so widespread and rising? Available at https://www.businessthink.unsw. edu.au/articles/why-is-workplace-bullying so-widespread-andrising.

ii. Marian Faa, ABC News: Thousands of Australians experience workplace bullying but their claims are often dismissed. Available at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11 07/workplace-bullyingcontinues-to-affect-thousands-of-australians/11671062.

iii. Priscilla Pho, Smart Company: Two-thirds of Australian employees experience workplace bullying: Here’s how to intervene. Available at https://www.smartcompany.com.au/people-human-resources/wellbeing/workplace-bullying-study/.

iv. Michael Quinlan, Business Think: Why is workplace bullying so widespread and rising? Available at https://www.businessthink.unsw. edu.au/articles/why-is-workplace bullying-so-widespread-andrising.

v. Australian Human Rights Commission: Workplace bullying: Violence, Harassment and Bullying Fact sheet. Available at https:// humanrights.gov.au/our work/employers/workplace-bullyingviolence-harassment-and-bullying-fact-sheet.

vi. Priscilla Pho, Smart Company: Two-thirds of Australian employees experience workplace bullying: Here’s how to intervene. Available at https://www.smartcompany.com.au/people-human-resources/wellbeing/workplace-bullying-study/.

vii. Dr. Samuel B Harvey et al, School of Psychiatry, University of New South Wales: Developing a mentally healthy workplace: A review of the literature: A report for the National Mental Health Commission and the Mentally Healthy Workplace Alliance. Available at http://affinityhealthhub.co.uk/d/attachments/developing-a-mentallyhealthy