Workplace bullying & harrassment in the age of Covid

In support of anti-bullying week 2016, our Chief Executive, Victoria Lewis, gave over 20 interviews on various national and regional radio stations across the country. Victoria's insight is well worth listening to and these interviews are summarised in this montage.

byrne·dean commissioned research as part of its commitment to anti-bullying week 2016. Given our coal face experience of problems in the working environments we were perhaps not “surprised” to find that 30% of people feel they have been the victim of bullying at work. It seems to be as prolific as ever. What may be surprising to some though, is that in a world where the vast majority of employers commit to zero tolerance and have clear policies stating that, two thirds of workplace bullying continues to go unreported. Our research also found that one third of workers had witnessed colleagues being bullied at work but over 60% took no action. Our findings are illustrated in our info-graphic.

At byrne·dean we work with a wide range of employers in all sorts of industries, helping them with this common issue – just how do you get people to raise their hand and say if they feel uncomfortable with treatment by their managers and / or colleagues. We firmly believe that the way to do this is to think carefully about the language you use. Bullying is quite simply a loaded word and in our experience it is hugely unlikely that the so-called “bully” ever intended to cause discomfort – they just didn’t think about the impact.

Have a listen to Victoria talking about why she believes people do not speak up and how you can go about tackling this in practice.