Join our JFM Law team as we answer your FAQs about Bullying and Harassment in the workplace.
Transcript
What is workplace bullying?
Workplace bullying is when there’s repeated ongoing treatment by one individual or a group of individuals against an employee or a group of people within the workplace. And this can be related to things like that person’s sexuality, their gender identity, their race, and a range of other factors. So that might be a manager is repeatedly or continuously finding fault in your work, unnecessarily insulting you using offensive language, singling you out and targeting you compared to your colleagues. They’re common examples of bullying behaviour that we see from clients.
Is placing an employee on a performance improvement plan (PIP) considered workplace bullying?
So circumstances where a performance improvement plan which maybe even started quite genuinely can evolve into bullying is where potentially the way that the person is managing it is unreasonable. It’s been going on for an illogical amount of time, and it hasn’t been documented in the correct way, or hasn’t followed correct processes. That’s when you’d be really looking at whether that performance improvement plan is genuine or not.
What is the difference between discrimination, bullying, and harassment in the workplace?
Discrimination tends to be targeting someone for a particular feature that they can’t help. So for example, targeting them because they’re a woman or because they’re of a certain ethnic background. It could also be a religious based type of discrimination.
Bullying is more general a term and it tends to relate to when there is basically inappropriate behaviour towards someone, whether it’s offensive behaviour, whether it’s insulting the person, whether it’s just treating them differently, singling them out, perhaps they feel like they have a target on their back.
Harassment is usually something where a person is made to feel very uncomfortable and that the behaviour that is happening towards them is really inappropriate. It tends to be very repeated. So, it’s something that someone constantly feels is part of their relationship or interactions with that person. The most serious type of harassment that we see is sexual harassment, which is usually unwanted physical advances or verbal language that is sexually inappropriate and targeted towards someone or a group of people.
What is workplace discrimination?
So workplace discrimination is when someone in the workplace is targeting or treating someone unfairly because of certain protected attributes. For example, you’re looking at things like overlooking someone for a promotion within the workplace, not hiring someone because of certain factors, and also paying people differently based on those factors. For example, paying someone a lesser wage because they are a woman.
Discrimination that we see is often unintentional, and it’s more to do with the existing biases that people have within the workplace, particularly managerial or executive staff. They may not even be aware that they have those biases towards people. People have particular background or ethnic groups or religious beliefs, but that can inform how they treat those people, and it may mean that they treat them differently. So, combating discrimination is all about making sure that people are treated equally and on an even footing in the workplace.
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The information contained in this post is current at the date of publishing – 14 June 2023.
