The Impact of Workplace Bullying and Harassment on Working Conditions

Workplace bullying and harassment are widely acknowledged as being unacceptable. However, economic pressures and job insecurity over the past four or five years have contributed to a rise in workplace tensions. Aside from the effect on the individual, there is considerable evidence that a failure to deal with bullying and harassment at work has a much wider impact, with a negative bearing on areas such as staff absence and teamwork.

A survey carried out by XpertHR has found that bullying and harassment at work is widespread, with 80% of organisations affected over the past two years. Bullying and harassment can occur in many forms. Harassment at work will be unwanted conduct that is demeaning and unacceptable and that has a negative affect on a person’s dignity in the workplace. Behaviour does not have to be ongoing to constitute harassment – it could be a single isolated incident on a series of incidents. Bullying at work might be offensive, malicious or insulting behaviour – it could be calculated to intimidate or an abuse or misuse of power structures. There could be an intention to humiliate, to denigrate or even to injure the person who is the subject of the bullying. By its nature bullying behaviour will always be unwanted and unwelcome, even though it may not be obvious and it could involve individuals or groups of people.

In the modern workplace bullying and harassment can occur anywhere from the water cooler to the virtual world, and cyber bullying is something that many employers have been forced to consider in terms of disciplinary measures and workplace policies.

The XpertHR survey has highlighted some significant bullying and harassment trends evident across a number of different organisations. For example, in 50% of incidents it was line managers who were carrying out the unacceptable behaviour. This is reflected in the type of behaviour that constituted the bullying and/or harassment under the survey, as in 54% of cases this was in the form of continuous criticism designed to undermine confidence, or being unrealistically overloaded with work.

The impact of bullying and harassment is felt broadly in those organisations that were surveyed. It had some impact on staff absence at 59% of respondent organisations and a major impact at 8%. 49% reported some impact on teamworking, with 10% stating it had a major impact on the ability of staff to work as a team. With respect to manager-staff relationships the impact was major for 21% of the organisations surveyed and there was some impact for 48%. Staff morale is also affected with some impact in 44% of cases and a major impact in 15%. The only area that was affected very little by bullying and harassment was the employer brand – only 14% of respondent organisations felt that bullying and harassment had a considerable effect here.

The survey also identified ways in which bullying and harassment in the workplace could be successfully tackled. These included awareness campaigns and ensuring the development of communication skills in all employees. When a bullying or harassment case has reached a critical point, using trained mediators was highlighted as being a highly successful way to deal with the issues. Finally, early intervention by an employer was crucial in ensuring the incidences of workplace harassment and bullying were kept to a minimum and that a degree of trust in management was retained by employees.

Organisations that faced problems with bullying and harassment were often those without a clear anti-bullying stance, where there was an existing culture of bullying from the top down, where line managers were not properly trained and where there was no proper procedure for dealing with bullying and harassment issues. The clear conclusion to draw from this is that there is merit in putting anti-bullying and harassment measures in place before such an incident has the chance to escalate.

Often, the impact of forms of bullying and harassment at work manifests itself as stress and this can have a serious impact on business – the Health and Safety Executive estimated that 13.5 million working days were lost to stress, depression and anxiety in 2007/8. Whilst absence numbers have fallen since then – the 2012 Absence Management Survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found that employee absence had fallen from 7.7 days to 6.8 per employee per year, compared to last year – the looming shadow of redundancy and job insecurity mean that more people are going to work ill, which can have a very negative impact on the individual employee and those they manage or work with.

An employer may end up having to pay compensation for the impact of stress on an employee – in the case of Walker v Northumberland County Council (1995) Mr. Walker accepted £175,000 in compensation after the court found his employer responsible for the second of two breakdowns suffered by Mr. Walker as a result of an excessive and exhausting workload. Another employee ‘at the end of her tether’ received £110,000 in compensation telecoms behemoth O2 in Dickins v O2 Plc [2008] EWCA Civ 1144, £110,000, as a result of excessive hours and an overly demanding workload imposed on an employee whose managers largely ignored her requests for help. Hatton v Sutherland (2002) was an umbrella case for four stress cases and set out guidelines for stress cases, including looking at whether the demands placed on an employee were unreasonable and the workload too heavy to be considered normal for the job, both of which can be components of harassment and bullying.

In Majrowski v Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS Trust 2005, the continuous criticism and unrealistic targets imposed on Mr. Majrowski that constituted bullying and harassment resulted in a judgment at Court of Appeal and then House of Lords level that damages may be awarded for anxiety caused by the harassment and any financial loss resulting from the harassment. Harassment was taken to another level in the case of a former Deutsche Bank worker who received £828,000 in damages in Helen Green v DB Group Services (UK) Ltd [2006] EWHC 1898, after what was described by the judge in the case as a relentless campaign of mean and spiteful behaviour by colleagues that lasted for more than three years. The sizeable damages were awarded as it was the court’s view that Helen Green would never again work in a job that was similarly well paid.

What these cases show is that there is compensation available for those who have suffered in this way in the workplace and nothing has been done to remedy the situation. They also demonstrate that there is clearly a need for employers to look at internal policies and procedures for employee care, management training, internal complaints handling and work distribution to ensure that no one employee finds themselves under unreasonable stress or pressure with nowhere to turn other than the courts.