Harassment and Bullying

Bullying and harassment in the workplace not only have a serious impact on the individuals involved, but can also spread to create a toxic working environment.

It can happen anywhere, at any time, and may be more common than you think. Learning how to identify and deal with it in your own workplace can help you to maintain a positive culture and environment for everyone.

The Facts about Bullying and Harassment

Bullying and harassment are not the same thing. Bullying does not actually have a legal definition and various organisations define it differently. What everyone agrees on is that it’s a pattern of offensive behaviours usually involving the misuse of power which can humiliate, upset or intimidate the recipient.

Harassment is a form of discrimination defined in law through the Equality Act. Like bullying, it’s also behaviour that offends, intimidates, humiliates or degrades, but there’s a key difference between bullying and harassment.

Someone on the receiving end of harassment is being treated unfairly because of a protected characteristic. These characteristics are defined in the Equality Act and include age, disability, race and sex.

The impact of Bullying and Harassment

When someone experiences bullying or harassment, they are more likely to suffer from stress, depression and anxiety. They are likely to have a low opinion of their managers, and they are likely to want to leave their organisation.

As well as the individual impact, a whole organisation suffers from a hostile working environment. Performance and productivity are negatively affected, illness and absence increase, and relations in the workplace are strained. All of this could eventually lead to legal proceedings.

What to do about Bullying and Harassment

Our policy towards bullying and harassment is one of zero tolerance. To support the policy, employees should always report any bullying or harassment they experience to someone who can help, i.e. their immediate line manager.

You as their manager then need to respond quickly and effectively to all complaints or signs of it.

At the same time, our employees must meet the company’s expected standards of behaviour and resist any bullying or harassing behaviour they come across.

Preventing Bullying and Harassment

What Employees Can Do

If employees experience bullying or harassment, even if they just overhear it and are not the target of it, they should feel able to challenge it by saying something. For example, if they were unhappy with the banter of their colleagues, they could approach them calmly, privately, and sensibly to let them know about it. In a safe and positive environment, people should feel comfortable to challenge this kind of behaviour themselves.

What Managers Can Do

If the employee instead chooses to tell you their, manager about the banter they had heard, it would be your responsibility to take immediate action and talk to the team members involved individually. This would allow you to nip any negative behaviour in the bud and reinforce the company’s zero tolerance policy.

What Everyone Can Do

All employees and managers should always keep the qualities below in mind in the workplace. Everyone should treat others as they would like to be treated – sensitively and respectfully. Remember that if everyone thinks before they speak or act, they are unlikely to offend anyone in the first place. But if they make a mistake and fear that that they have accidentally offended somebody, simply apologise.

This is an important first step and may prevent things from escalating any further.

Resolving an Incident

If a serious offence has been caused, intentionally or accidentally, it’s important that the proper steps are taken in the right order to make sure that the issue gets resolved.

Request to stop – Sometimes an individual can resolve an incident with a polite request to stop the problem behaviour.

Informal meeting – If that isn’t possible or doesn’t work, an informal meeting involving the manager or someone in authority can stop the behaviour.

Grievance process – If not, a formal grievance process is the next step. A grievance should be made in writing to the manager the company’s formal grievance procedure should be followed.

Tribunal – Finally, the individual may have to resort to an employment tribunal. This is a serious step which may result in fines for both managers and employees.

Sexual Harassment

Sexual harassment is unwanted conduct of a sexual nature. It has the purpose or effect of violating the dignity of a worker, or creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment for them.

Examples of sexual harassment

• Invading personal space and talking in an intimate way.
• Personal comments about appearance and body that makes the person feel uncomfortable.
• Pressing a colleague to talk about his or her romantic experiences.
• Persistently talking to others about his or her own romantic experiences.
• Talking about things that are sexual in nature.
• Inappropriate touching of a person’s body and/or clothing
• Repeatedly asking for dates despite being rebuffed
• Asking for sexual favours
• Making sexually offensive gestures, remarks or facial expressions
• Sending sexually inappropriate material via email or social media
• Threats or bribes for sexual favours
• Spreading rumours about someone’s sexuality

If any of these things happen to an employee, or an employee simply witnesses them, it’s essential that it is reported to you as their manager as soon as possible.

Victims of harassment can often feel extremely uncomfortable about trying to address the problem, but if nothing is done then the consequences can be serious. The victim continues to suffer, the message to colleagues is that this behaviour is acceptable, and the organisation may become exposed to legal action.

Cyberbullying

Cyberbullying is very easy to carry out and is becoming more and more common
in the workplace. Bullies can exploit the anonymity of the internet to deal a lot of
damage with only a little effort. This can often result in a greater mental strain on
victims than conventional bullying.

As with any other form of bullying or harassment, employees are encouraged to try to deal with cyberbullying through an informal approach, talking calmly to the person responsible for causing offence. If this fails, they should take it further and present the details of the case to their manager.

For further support and advice, please contact a member of the HR Team.