Bully for who? How HR defines and deals with bullying

When a recent survey found that one in 10 civil servants employed by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister claimed to have been bullied at work, few people were particularly surprised.

Lyn Witheridge, director of the Andrea Adams Trust, told the Guardian newspaper that she believed the problem was rife in Whitehall - and blamed deputy prime minister John Prescott for setting a bad example when dealing with television interviews. "I wouldn't like to have a gentle conversation with him if he was my boss," she said.

Since the trust is currently working with a number of government departments to help tackle bullying - including the Department of Trade and Industry, which at first had no policy of its own to deal with the problem, even though it oversees the Dignity at Work campaign aimed at supporting other employers - her remarks are clearly well grounded in the realities of civil service life.

But the issue is not confined to the public sector, or to the UK. One International Labour Organisation report described management bullying as the fastest-growing complaint from workers in the United States.

In this issue of IRS Employment Review, we report the findings of our own survey of UK employers, which seeks to discover the extent of the problem and the methods being adopted to tackle it.

Our research seems to show that employers have become increasingly aware of the need to deal with this issue in recent years. Almost all employers participating in the study now have some sort of policy in place, and half of the remainder plan to introduce one soon. And with the exception of a small number of companies, reports of bullying incidents remain comparatively rare - albeit endemic at low levels almost everywhere.

Our survey also shows that, most frequently, cases can be dealt with informally. It is also common for cases to be dismissed as unfounded - the second most likely outcome, our respondents suggest. But around half the organisations that reported having to deal with bullying incidents reported that they had taken disciplinary action against a bully, while one in four had dismissed them.

HR practitioners say there are a number of difficulties in dealing with bullying - not least in getting victims to come forward. But a particularly thorny issue is how the idea of bullying is defined in the first place.

See Ousting the workplace bully: learning from experience for more.