Advice for employers
You have a duty to provide a safe and healthy workplace. It’s important that your organisation has systems in place to prevent bullying and respond to any allegations of bullying.
Bullying is best dealt with by taking steps to prevent it long before it becomes a risk to worker health and safety. The longer the behaviour continues, the more difficult it is to address - and the harder it becomes to repair working relationships.
WorkSafe’s handbook Preventing and responding to bullying at work provides detailed information to help you identify the risk factors in your workplace and put measures in place to eliminate or reduce those risks. It also provides advice to help you appropriately respond to reports of bullying.
Preventing bullying
Here are some ways to get started to prevent bullying behaviour.
Consult
It’s your duty to consult with health and safety committees, representatives and workers. You must consult when you’re identifying any signs in your workplace that bullying is happening, or could happen, and when you’re making decisions to deal with problem areas. You must also consult when you’re developing procedures, information and training, and any time that you review or change the measures you have in place to prevent or respond to bullying.
Know your risk factors
There are common risk factors that can contribute to workplace bullying. These include lack of appropriate work systems, poor relationships and the presence of vulnerable workers in the workforce.
Train people managers to act
Training is also important. You must make sure that workers understand their role and have the right skills to do their job. This is especially important for people in management and supervisory roles, who should know how to identify and respond to problematic behaviours before they can escalate into bullying situations.
Implement a prevention policy and procedures
A policy sets standards of behaviour and clearly states that inappropriate behaviour will not be tolerated, as well as the consequences for breaching the policy. A procedure outlines how reports of bullying will be dealt with in an objective, fair and transparent way.
Make it clear that bullying is not tolerated
Promote your policy and ensure that your workers are comfortable speaking up about bullying. This can be encouraged through your leadership team, regular reports at health and safety meetings and making information available to health and safety representatives and workers.
Responding to incidents and complaints
If a worker complains of being bullied, and your workplace has agreed procedures in place, you should follow these as soon as the complaint is received.
It’s important to treat every matter seriously, act promptly, and provide support and confidentiality for those involved. Investigate the allegation thoroughly, keep all parties informed about the process and maintain records of all meetings and interviews.
Your response will vary depending on the seriousness of the allegation. Depending on the situation, here are some ways to immediately address a bullying complaint:
Make a clear request for the behaviour to stop
This can be done by the person affected, their supervisor, manager or another appropriate person. This approach is best used when unreasonable behaviour first occurs or when a supervisor or manager directly observes the behaviour, as the person that the allegation is being made against may not be aware of the effect their behaviour is having.
Face-to-face discussion or mediation
This can help resolve the issues if all parties agree to participate. This approach works best early in the process, when relationships have not completely broken down.
Investigations
This should be the first step taken when a serious allegation is made. Investigations focus on establishing whether or not a bullying report is substantiated. If allegations involve senior staff, multiple people or vulnerable workers, a neutral and independent investigator may be appropriate to conduct the process and recommend further action if required.
If you need outside help to address bullying issues, we have advice to help you find the right trainer, mediator or investigator for your workplace.
