Workplace harassment remains a significant problem, with 83 per cent of employers reporting at least one case in the past two years.
Online specialist in legal compliance XpertHR surveyed human-resources professionals across 160 organisations – employing a total of 385,000 people – and found that the most likely perpetrators of incidents are line managers.
The survey revealed that bullying and harassment are most likely to manifest as undermining behaviour (cited by 54 per cent of respondents), with employees complaining that they are continually given too much work, or criticised in a manner that is designed to undermine their confidence.
Sexual harassment was reported as frequently as physical intimidation, or offensive emails – one in five employers (22 per cent) said they had reported a case in the last two years.
Charlotte Wolff, XpertHR editor and author of the report, said: “Our research found that bullying and harassment can seriously undermine many areas of working life. For instance, 21 per cent said it had seriously affected manager-staff relationships, and six in ten (59 per cent) said this type of behaviour had depleted staff morale.”€
In this episode of the Safety & Health Podcast, ‘Burnout, stress and being human’, Heather Beach is joined by Stacy Thomson to discuss burnout, perfectionism and how to deal with burnout as an individual, as management and as an organisation.
We provide an insight on how to tackle burnout and why mental health is such a taboo subject, particularly in the workplace.
In my experience, this is a difficult topic to deal with.
However, one initiative that i’ve seen to work is the ‘360 degree’ asessment, where the employees discuss thier managers performance and can highlight bullying issues.
This still has its downsides depending upon the culture of the company and, 1- getting the employees to trust that there won’t be repercussions, 2- made worse by repercussions and 3- the next level up of management actually taking notice and action where necessary.