What do you do if one of your team complains they are being picked on?

Bullying can make employees’ lives a misery, affect performance and damage careers. It can also have a serious impact on organisations, with estimates showing up to 18.9m working days are lost each year to bullying and half of all stress-related illnesses are a direct result of bullying.

Conflict at work is inevitable from time to time, but when talking about bullying we are referring to one or more people engaging in persistent, vindictive, cruel or humiliating attempts to undermine, criticise, condemn, hurt or humiliate someone.

Employers have a duty of care to their employees and this includes dealing with bullying at work, although research by the charity Family Lives found that 91 per cent of respondents to a survey on workplace bullying felt that their organisation did not deal with it adequately and 48 per cent felt they had to just put up with it.

Address the issue

If one of your team complains about being bullied, you need to address it tactfully to avoid accusations of bullying yourself. Start by encouraging your colleague to talk to the ‘bully’ to try to address the issue. If that doesn’t put an end to it, you might decide to intervene to help them smooth things over in an informal way.

Alternatively, you could refer the complainant on to your company’s HR department, if you have one, who will be able to take things further, albeit as a more formal procedure. Whatever action you take, the most important thing is to instil a culture where bullying is not tolerated and staff are encouraged to report it.