What is Bullying ?
Bullying is never okay. It can be difficult to understand what it is unless you’ve experienced or witnessed it.
Characterised as offensive, intimidating, malicious or insulting behaviour or an abuse of authority through means intended to undermine, humiliate, denigrate or injure the recipient.
Bullying and/or harassment may be by an individual against an individual, perhaps by someone in a position of authority such as a manager or supervisor, or involve groups of people. A manager may be bullied by a direct report. Bullying and/or harassment may be obvious or it may be insidious.
Whatever form bullying and/or harassment takes, it is unwarranted and unwelcome to the individual.
Bullying can take the form of physical, verbal and non-verbal conduct. Non-verbal conduct includes postings on social media outlets. Bullying may include, by way of example:
- shouting at, being sarcastic towards, ridiculing or demeaning others
- physical or psychological threats
- overbearing and intimidating levels of supervision
- inappropriate and/or derogatory remarks about someone's performance
- abuse of authority or power by those in positions of seniority
- deliberately excluding someone from meetings or communications without good reason
If you want to talk to someone, you can report with contact details. Alternatively, you can make an anonymous disclosure which will allow us to investigate if there are multiple instances in one area.
What is harassment?
We believe that harassment is never okay.
Harassment is unwanted conduct related to a relevant protected characteristic, which has the purpose or effect of violating an individual’s dignity or creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment for that individual’.
The relevant protected characteristics are age, disability, gender reassignment, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation.
Harassment may be persistent or an isolated incident. The key element is that the actions or comments are viewed as demeaning and unacceptable to the recipient. The recipient’s view will not, however, constitute the only interpretation as to what is reasonable behaviour and what is not.
Some forms of harassment are considered a Hate Crime. A hate incident or crime is any act of violence or hostility against a person or property that is motivated by hostility or prejudice towards a person due to a particular protected characteristic.
Bullying and harassment are contrary to the Equality Act 2010 and our Tackling Bullying and Harassment policy.
Please be aware, the link for policies will take you to our internal staff intranet. You will need to log on to access it, but we cannot connect this to you and your use of Report and Support.
Please be aware, the link for policies will take you to our internal staff intranet. You will need to log on to access it, but we cannot connect this to you and your use of Report and Support.
Think
- Are you in immediate danger? If you are in immediate danger or seriously injured, you can contact the emergency services on 999 (or 112 from a mobile phone).
- Find a safe space. If an incident has just happened try and find somewhere you feel safe.
- What are bullying and harassment? It might be useful to think about what is meant by bullying and harassment and how these behaviours are described.
Report
- Report and Support. Employees can report an incident using a form. You can choose to do this anonymously [link] or you can request support by reporting with your contact details [link]. If you choose to report with your contact details you will be able to talk through the options and support available to you, in confidence with a member of the People Hub.
Get Support
- Take care of yourself. It’s important that you take care of yourself. If you’ve heard something distressing or if something is troubling you, the Employee Assistance Programme offers confidential help to employees.