Bullying & Harassment – responding to claims
The government has bought in a Guide for preventing and responding to workplace bullying. It looks at practical ways to manage the risks of bullying under the workplace health and safety laws and how to effectively respond to claims.
The new guide is replacing the Prevention of Workplace Harassment Code of Practice 2004.
What’s new? It now covers channels such as email, social media and text as well as setting a consistent national guide of what bullying is.
Workplace harassment/bullying is where a person is subjected to behaviour, other than sexual harassment, that:
• is repeated, unwelcome and unsolicited
• the person considers to be offensive, intimidating, humiliating or threatening
• a reasonable person would consider to be offensive, humiliating, intimidating or threatening.
The guide sets a minimum standard to define what and employee should reasonably know and helps to determine if bullying is occurring in your workplace.
Workplace harassment/bullying covers a wide range of behaviours and some scenarios provided by the guide are:
• abusing a person loudly, usually when others are present
• repeated threats of dismissal or other severe punishment for no reason
• constant ridicule and being put down
• leaving offensive messages on email or the telephone
• sabotaging a person’s work, for example, by deliberately withholding or supplying incorrect information, hiding documents or equipment, not passing on messages and getting a person into trouble in other ways
• humiliating a person through gestures, sarcasm, criticism and insults, often in front of customers, management or other workers
• spreading gossip or false, malicious rumours about a person with an intent to cause the person harm.
Click here to review the Guide yourself: http://www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/sites/swa/about/publications/pages/guide-workplace-bullying
Alternatively, we can help. If you are a business owners or manager requiring assistance, our experienced team of consultants are here to help, contact us on (07) 5530 1571.
