Getting to grips with workplace bullying

The evolution of equality and diversity practice in the UK has led many organisations to adopt stringent policies designed to tackle bullying in the workplace. Peter McGeer¹ highlights some of the key issues that employers need to bear in mind when deciding how to make policies achieve their objectives.

On 31 July 2003, the City broking firm Cantor Fitzgerald lost a case for constructive dismissal brought by Steven Horkulak, a former senior employee. The court heard that Mr Horkulak's boss, Lee Amaitis, bullied him until he resigned. On one occasion Mr Amaitis called Mr Horkulak at home and threatened to "break him in two".

Typically, the media's exposure of the gruesome details of this case, and the fact that the court ordered Cantor to pay Mr Horkulak in the region of £1 million in compensation, reinforces the perception that bullying is rife in the City of London.

Unsurprisingly, in the 24 hours preceding the outcome of this case, the media were reporting the random views of City workers with regard to bullying. Most appear to be accepting of the status quo and are reported as saying either, "bullying does not happen where I work", or "this type of behaviour is fairly innocuous and simply goes with the territory".

The ruling, despite the predictions of the HR community, is unlikely to set new standards for City firms. A number of organisations may be beyond the pale when it comes to fostering inclusive working environments for their staff and potential employees, but it is questionable whether the fate of Cantor, and others, will have even a medium-term impact. The extreme behaviour revealed in this particular case may be damaging to the employee, illegal and morally wrong, but it is not necessarily typical of the City, where employment discrimination generally is of a more insidious nature.

This and other recent high-profile cases of oppressive behaviour on the part of senior managers towards their staff does not accord with the concerns of most organisations who take steps to address bullying. Unlike Cantor, most workplaces are not a metaphor for hand-to-hand combat, and however repugnant the alleged bullying by Mr Amaitis was, it would be relatively easy to address within the mainstream of employment in which most of us work.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to gauge the extent and nature of bullying within organisations. Opinions vary about its very existence. The spokesperson for a national membership organisation will pronounce that only wimps complain of bullying, while a professor of occupational health with a high media profile will explain that bullying is a serious problem that has its roots in high levels of management stress.

Bullying, or allegations of bullying, can happen along a wide spectrum of workplace behaviour. A significant number of complaints - some would say the majority - are concerned with deciding where the line should be drawn between dictatorial behaviour and a manager's right to manage.

As equality and diversity approaches achieve a higher profile within organisations, there is a danger, particularly when attempting to address the problems of bullying at work, that formal complaints procedures are all too often used as a means of addressing everyday grievances between managers and their staff.

Policy difficulties

In recent years there has been a distinct trend for organisations to move from narrow policies designed to address unlawful discrimination towards the adoption of more inclusive dignity at work policies that also address the problems of harassment and bullying.

Kerry Hawkins, partner at TMS Equality and Diversity Consultants, is an expert in devising measures to deal with bullying in the workplace. In reflecting over his many years as an equality and diversity consultant, he raises some crucial dilemmas currently facing organisations when it comes to dealing with bullying. He says that for all their narrowness, the early harassment policies were totally unambiguous because they related to personal characteristics - nobody should harass someone on the grounds of their race or sex, or - later - their disability.

The equality and diversity policies operating in most large public and private sector organisations were initiated to ensure compliance with anti-discrimination legislation. In recent years, there has been a desire to ensure that policies are broader, more business-focused and embrace the aspirations of employees. The danger, often inherent, in the establishment of a dignity at work policy, is that employees can seek to use a formal complaints procedure as a means of redressing grievances that have little or nothing to do with bullying at work. What many organisations need, as a means of avoiding costly, time-consuming and inevitably demoralising investigations into allegations of bullying, are mechanisms for dealing with instances where relationships between managers and their staff are breaking down. Hawkins agrees: "Quite often, somebody needs to acknowledge that a problem exists that needs addressing without pursuing a formal complaint."

Hawkins says that the concept of bullying is difficult to interpret. The tendency to broaden harassment policies into the arena of dignity at work, often attempting to draw a fine line between what constitutes reasonable and unacceptable behaviour, can become vague. He says that very often, allegations of bullying stem from poor standards of supervision rather than actual, wilful bullying.

In a concerted effort to ensure watertight practices on dignity at work, many organisations define harassment and bullying separately. This can lead to problems because any definition of bullying is inevitably open to a range of interpretations, particularly when forming a view on the effects of the alleged bullying on the individual making a complaint.

Many in the HR and equality and diversity fields are coming to the view that harassment and bullying should not be separated. This means that harassment and bullying should simply be defined as behaviour that affects someone's dignity or subjects them to an intimidating, hostile, degrading and humiliating environment, and that any behaviour that does so will be addressed within such a policy.

Compared to bullying, harassment is relatively easy to understand and deal with. It also carries with it a high degree of repugnance that is not so evident when it comes to instances where it is bullying that is being alleged.

In most large organisations, if someone feels they are being harassed they can pursue a number of procedural options. They can approach their manager and ask for the behaviour to stop. They can approach the individual who has been harassing them and ask for the behaviour to stop. Allegations of bullying are far more difficult to deal with, especially when formal complaints are received.

A complaint of bullying made by an employee against their manager will often result in a costly and time-consuming investigation involving extensive interviewing of both parties and witnesses, and the production of a report. Those investigating often struggle to understand what the complaint is and what behaviours are actually being complained about, while the person who the complaint has been made against often struggles to understand what has gone wrong. Very often, the outcome is that bullying did not occur but personal relationships went wrong somewhere.

A public sector problem?

There is a generally held belief that the problems of workplace bullying, and the means of addressing it, are greater in the public than the private sector. Research data² reveals that significantly more public sector workers say they have been bullied than those in the private sector. This is surprising in a sector that places such a heavy emphasis on employee equity.

The Civil service diversity survey, published in 2001, identified a significant proportion of staff (15%) with recent experience of being treated in a way they would describe as bullying or discrimination. The survey revealed that disabled staff were more likely than others to experience unacceptable treatment.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) advises employers to adopt a policy to deal with workplace bullying, advocating that bullying should be treated like any other workplace hazard where steps are taken to minimise risk. Public sector organisations, by their very nature, are far more likely to heed this advice than their private sector counterparts, and here may lie the answer to the question of why, on the face of it, bullying is more of a problem in this sector.

Crime figures rise when crime reporting levels rise. And this may be what is happening with regard to workplace bullying in the public sector, where recourse to procedures for dealing with bullying are generally readily available and viewed as an acceptable, almost routine, means of settling grievances between staff and their managers.

It is unlikely that bullying is any more of a problem for the public sector than for private companies. But problems do exist in the public sector in two areas. First, in the large number of cases brought under harassment and bullying procedures that are due to a failure to properly manage individual employees. And second, in relation to bureaucratic and time-consuming HR procedures.

Because procedures to tackle harassment and bullying are so closely linked to discipline, there is a tendency for them to be unwieldy and difficult to prosecute. In the public sector, this is partly as a result of procedures growing organically over a number of years while trying to satisfy the needs of trade unions, HR, managers and, in the case of local and central government, politicians.

The case study of British Energy below examines the organisation's growing recognition of staff concerns over bullying and harassment, and how it decided to deal with the issue.

Case study: British Energy

Dealing with harassment and bullying

British Energy produces 21% of the UK's electricity from eight nuclear and one coal-fired power stations. Before privatisation in 1996, the organisation was known as Nuclear Electric.

The organisation employs in excess of 5,000 people, who are mostly employed in power stations working shifts to cover a 24-hour day.

The company first introduced an equal opportunities policy in the early 1990s. This was followed, towards the end of the decade, by the adoption of a harassment policy that was updated in 2002. Geoff Pears, British Energy's diversity manager, says harassment and bullying had not been a serious concern until then. However, as they became the focal point of more tribunal cases, he and his colleagues began to regard the absence of a policy as a problem, and decided to explore the need to fill what was a potential gap in the company's equality and diversity agenda.

A former senior HR manager within British Energy, Pears is enthusiastic about the need to understand employee perceptions and equality and diversity within the company. He says that although few cases of harassment and bullying were reported, a staff attitude survey in 1992 revealed that more staff had experienced some form of discrimination, harassment or bullying than was being reported (see table).

The survey results, in common with the Civil service diversity survey of 2001 and other surveys concerned with public sector employee perceptions of discrimination, showed a strong tendency among staff to say that discrimination, harassment and bullying take place "due to other reasons" than age, disability, gender and race discrimination. In all surveys, this may well be a clear indicator of problems between employees and managers.

Only 62% of employees in the British Energy survey were aware of the existence of a company procedure for dealing with harassment. Less than half (42%) said they would feel able to report harassment, including bullying, if it happened to them, fearing a negative impact as a result of making a complaint. And only 35% of employees said they believed that if a complaint was made it would be dealt with effectively.

The negative survey results, says Pears, were a clear indication that the company had a confidence problem to restore. He acknowledges that, at times, staff morale had sunk, with the business continuing to experience serious difficulties and with its long-term future the subject of speculation. Additionally, many employees had suffered financially as a result of a collapse in the price of British Energy shares. The immediate objective was to ensure that everybody knew about the company's code of practice on harassment. To achieve this, Pears and his colleagues organised a poster campaign, team briefings and training courses, with information about intolerance of harassment emblazoned across the opening page of the company's intranet site.

As a result of the survey, the company revised the wording of its code of practice to make it more coherent and readable, and to inform managers of their responsibilities when dealing with cases of alleged harassment and bullying.

"Guidance to managers [see document extract 2] now says quite clearly you will not tolerate any incidents of harassment, and you will deal with it if it happens," says Pears.

Guidance notes advise managers to be aware that "energetic" management styles can lead to behaviours or language that constitute harassment or bullying. Managers are told to "beware of your own style, and always treat everyone with respect and dignity at all times, even when dealing with performance problems".

Most at risk

Managers are encouraged to think in terms of who is most at risk of harassment, and this includes: