Identifying bullying and harassment
Bullying
As there is no legal definition for bullying, it can be hard to identify and address in the workplace. Acas defines bullying as ‘unwanted behaviour from a person or group that is either offensive, intimidating, malicious, or insulting’. Bullying may also be ‘an abuse or misuse of power that undermines, humiliates, or causes physical or emotional harm to someone’. Bullying can often be subtle, but prolonged exposure to bullying can have a detrimental impact on employee wellbeing and the wider workplace culture.
Spreading malicious rumours about someone
Constantly putting someone down in meetings
Deliberately giving someone a heavier workload than everyone else
Excluding someone from team social events
Putting humiliating, offensive, or threatening comments or photos on social media.
Example of bullying
Jerome has recently joined a new team at work. His new colleagues have not been very welcoming and hold team meetings without him. Jerome has missed several deadlines because he has not been attending the meetings and he is now on performance review. His colleagues continue to exclude him from team meetings and laugh amongst themselves whenever he attends progress meetings.
Bullying can be a one-off event or it might be a regular pattern of behaviour. It can take place in-person, online, during work hours or outside work hours in work-related situations.
Source: ACAS: Bullying at work
Harassment
Harassment and bullying are often conflated. Harassment, however, is covered by discrimination law (Equality Act 2010) and can be a serious hate crime.
Harassment can be behaviour that causes the victim to feel:
Disrespected
Frightened
Humiliated
Insulted
Intimidated
Threatened
Three types of harassment
Harassment related to age, disability, gender reassignment, race, religion or belief, sex and / or sexual orientation
Sexual harassment that refers to unwanted sexual behaviours
A person being treated less favourably because of how they’ve responded to previous harassment (e.g. reporting it).
Source: ACAS: Discrimination and the law
Example of harassment
(related to sex)
Clare is the only female mechanic that works in the garage. Whenever it's break time, her colleagues shout things like 'milk with two sugars, love' at her. It was funny the first couple of times, but now she feels disrespected and thinks they only treat her this way because she's a woman.
