 Good morning and welcome to Sadwick Australia's virtual seminar series. I'd like to welcome those of us who are present today and those who will be listening online. I'm Peter Miller and today I'm going to be facilitating today's discussion. Firstly, I'd like to acknowledge that we are gathered on the traditional lands of the Ghana people and I pay my respects to them, their elders, past, present and future. Today we're going to explore some really interesting areas around workplace bullying and how to design a bullying free workplace. We all know because we work in this field and are familiar with the definition of workplace bullying, which is repeated an unreasonable behaviour directed to a worker or a group of workers and that creates a risk to health and safety. On the slides that we've been having during our introduction are some of the data that some of us are familiar with that remind us that workplace bullying remains a serious problem in Australia's workplace and something we must do something about. It has huge financial and human consequences. Our panel today are experts and well respected in their fields and I'm not going to do justice by talking their full biography with you today but I'm going to do a brief introduction and suggest that if you'd like to know more about them go on to our website. First it's my great pleasure to introduce Commissioner Peter Hampton from Fair Work Australia. Commissioner Hampton was appointed to Fair Work Australia in 2010 where he also is the head of the anti-bullying panel. He has a bachelor in business and majored in personnel and industrial relations and prior to that worked as director of policy and strategy for Safe Work SA. And I'm very pleased to introduce our next guest Bernadette Nicole Butler who is a health and safety expert who's come down from Queensland to help us out today. Bernadette is currently manager of leadership and culture at Workplace Health and Safety in Queensland and previously was the chief policy officer for Safe Work SA. And finally but not least Michelle. Michelle's the associate professor of psychology at the University of South Australia and Michelle is a leading thinker in this field and I'm sure that all three of our speakers today are going to give us some really useful insights into workplace bullying. So Bernadette and Peter, could I just ask you first Peter and then Bernadette to start. What are we talking about? Oh when we're talking about workplace bullying perhaps you could give some common examples from your experience as a Fair Work Commissioner and Bernadette from your experience with the regulator. In terms of anti-bullying applications that the commission deals with then we were exposed to a whole range of workplaces and scenarios but what we certainly see is that where there are bullying allegations in place or particularly where there's bullying conduct that's present. What you do see is an organisation that's sort of distracted from its main focus. In other words we probably all understand the impact that bullying conduct has on the individual but what's often not understood is the impact that bullying conduct has on other people in the workplace and the workplace itself. So for instance what we do see is organisations distracted from what they need to be doing. We see the poor productivity, we see absenteeism, we see a lot of dysfunctional workplaces and I suspect the reason for that is that the bullying conduct doesn't occur in isolation it generally occurs in the context of a whole culture and so when later on we talk about some of the solutions to that we need to of course look at the organisational context and culture and some of those infrastructure things because that's ultimately how these matters are dealt with and prevented and appropriate. So even though it's played out through dysfunctional interpersonal relationships there's bigger things happening in the organisation behind the scene. Not always but almost always. Right, very interesting and burn it in. Yeah I'd agree you know if we look at the workplace culture outside of just individual behaviours because individual behaviours even when you look at them you may just be working on what you see as an impact between two people where in actual fact it is often supported by an organisational culture as Peter said that hasn't got their eye on the ball for that but also it doesn't account for the harm that's caused to people that work around them their families and many other people and the organisation as a whole so productivity, loss of business impact on their reputation so there are impacts that are really broad and I think in terms of what you would see as a bullying and how people would see bullying and make a complaint against bullying really ranges from anything where a person may feel that they've been isolated from particular meetings or work that they have been treated unfairly and consistently because as you see the definition will come up at some stage where it's repeated and unreasonable behaviour it's not reasonable management action right through to what is really common assault so in some circumstances those bullying experiences really are matters for the police versus either the Fair Work Commission or Work Health and Safety Regulators So the examples in terms of bullying can go from assault through to disrespectful behaviour that's repeated and undermining people So Michelle you're an international researcher in this space as one of the opening slides we had some of the data about the prevalence in Australia is Australia worse, better, the same as similar OECD countries? So the prevalence rate for workplace bullying in Australia based on the most recent data is 9.4% and if we look at the comparative data particularly with Europe that would actually place us 6 out of the 34 EU countries so I'd regard that as solid evidence that the bullying prevalence rate in Australia is pretty high but you know one thing that might surprise people in this field is that we see bullying across a whole range of industries so bullying amongst staff members which is what we're talking about here we can find that between prison offices we can find that in hospitals between nurses, between doctors we can find that in schools between school teachers we find it in the government, we find it in the private sector so it really is a broad phenomenon cutting across all Australian industries there are some industries that are a little bit more at risk than others women tend to report higher exposure to bullying than do men women also feature more highly in bullying complaints that might come to regulators I'm not sure if that's also true of the Fair Work Commission and there are some pockets of industries that are consistently high risk whenever we look at the data in Australia or internationally there are things like healthcare, community services government and administration, sometimes education right now though kind of a high risk industry is the energy sector where we've seen a lot of change in Australia and they've really increased in the bullying prevalence over the last five or so years so I guess that was to all of you Annette, that leads to a point at this particular you're saying it's across all sectors but there are some sectors that are vulnerable are there particular individuals who are more vulnerable so what are the characteristics of the people who are experiencing being bullied or perhaps those people who, the characteristics of those who might be potentially sources of undesirable behaviour and I ask this to all of you Well from my perspective I think that's a very difficult question my experience both in a work health and safety setting and also as part of the Fair Work Commission is that there are very few common characteristics the reality is that a bullying conduct is partly it's a question of the perception of the person who has an expectation of the way they'll be treated in terms of the individuals named or the persons that are expected that are on the receiving end of in our case an application there are no particular single characteristics and indeed I mean that's natural human behaviours that people will have different expectations about the way they conduct themselves the way they treat the people and that's what we're dealing with what's important I think is that it's not to spend too much time concentrating on the individuals but concentrating on the context in which conduct occurs it always has a conduct and like every work health and safety hazard and bullying is another one of those it's a question of systematic approach it accepts that individuals are different they have different tolerances, they have different expectations but the system needs to be designed to cope with that so if you look at a system whereby so let's look at a manual hazard that in a sense everyone would accept it you design a system accepting that individuals are different they're built differently, they do things differently sometimes they do stupid things sometimes they don't act appropriately or rationally but we design those manual systems that accepts that people are different we need to take the same approach to design anti-bullying approaches accepting that people are different different tolerances, different approaches, different expectations we need systems that accept that we're dealing with humans and human beings they have a degree of tolerance for difference and so it would seem to me that I think any sort of study into the characteristics of people that make complaints or put in our case, put in applications or those that are on the receiving end of those applications but what was that might be interesting from my point of view I think that would be a distraction from the main game So the point that you're making is that it's seated within an organisation so Bernadette and Michelle so there's some organisational factors that kind of give us some signs that organisations may be more or less likely to have bullying complaints arise Yeah perhaps like to respond to that and respond to what the commissioner has said so there has been some research into the individual factors that might be associated with people experiencing bullying or not but overwhelmingly what we see when we look across all of the scientific studies all around the world we see it is the work related factors we see that bullying arises as a product of the functioning of the organisational system so if the organisation is functioning really well we don't see much bullying but if it's not functioning so well and particularly in certain key areas then we see bullying arise we see absenteeism arise we see low productivity we see a whole range of effects so the focus really should be on understanding how the system is functioning where it's not functioning so well and building that resilient system to support resilient workers and to add to that when we look at the legislation particularly around work health and safety we are expected to implement safe systems of work so it really goes to what does that look like in an organisation and every organisation will be slightly different every team will be slightly different and every industry has differences that need to be accounted for and so no one size fits all so if we look at those organisational factors it could be that and even people for example when you assess psychological risk you might look at job control you might look at overload what's the work look like and what kind of work is it different people work differently with different workloads for example I love challenging complex work that's my sweet spot if I have one thing to do I may struggle over time because I will feel like that's not enough it's not challenging I need more to do whereas other people have different needs in their workplace and really I think when you're looking at a WHS system as Peter said you're looking at physical hazards the requirement is under the legislation to consult with the workers if you ask the workers what are the hazards it does a couple of things it helps them identify the hazards what are the peculiarities for your particular workspace but it also helps them have some ownership about what that might look like and the same can be done around implementing safe systems of work around psychological risk to reduce bullying so you mentioned a couple of factors I'd just like to touch base on it with respect to the research so what the research shows is that their work is really fast paced so there's too much work to do in too little time if workers don't have a lot of control over when and how they do their work that's a risk factor for bullying red tape too many layers of approval too many work constraints with getting things done in a timely way again that's a risk factor for bullying perhaps the biggest risk factor in terms of the evidence is actually what's called role ambiguity so that's when the boundaries of the role aren't clear and people can be allocated all sorts of work tasks and ask to do all sorts of different things that may not really be legitimate or appropriate for their role and we see this consistently coming out in the bullying research is that something the lack of role clarity that you've seen Peter in your experience absolutely look a reasonable proportion of the matters the Fair Work Commission deals with in the anti-bullying area arise in the context of either workplace change or disciplinary or performance management now anyone working this field would understand why that occurs but what's interesting is that a subset associated with that is not just the different perceptions as to what reasonable management action is as against unreasonable action but this idea about role ambiguity and in particular workers or managers not actually understanding their role properly understanding the parameters and they don't understand therefore what they're being measured against or what the managers are not quite clear exactly what they're measuring so our practical experience absolutely coincides with that research Yes I do agree we in Queensland and across jurisdictions there are people at work too which is a psychosocial risk assessment tool and it does measure role ambiguity, role conflict autonomy and the supports that when balanced out really lead to a psychologically healthy and safe workplace when there's an imbalance it leads to an unsafe workplace and therefore those factors can then lead to or can result in bullying and sometimes when you have managers who are put in positions to manage teams who don't have the right skill set and then don't really understand not just their own roles but how to then work with the people they're managing or supervising that really has the potential to escalate minor problems into bullying Managers play an absolutely key role so we analysed 342 bullying complaints that were lodged with the local health and safety regulator here Safe Work SA we found that across all of those bullying complaints it's really coming down to the way that managers are performing their role in three key areas so how the working hours are administrated and coordinated so rosters and schedules and leave and things like that Where do they perceive this fear? Absolutely, is it fair is their input into the process and particularly fairness across the whole work group not just singling one person out performance management as the commissioner mentioned is the second domain and work loads are allocated and managed right through to the issues of under performance which are around 40% of those complaints and the third area is how managers go about building the relationships with individual workers with the team and also generally in terms of work health and safety are they leading the way in terms of a healthy and a safe work environment So there's a fairly consistent message I'm hearing here about organisational factors but also management style and communication between workers I'm hearing quite a lot about managers and the people they supervise problems in their relationship but what about worker to worker complaints of bullying is that something that you see a lot of or is it more manager to worker relationships? Because of the definition of bullying that we've discussed already there is no need for a power relationship to be present but it is fair to say that the majority of applications the Fairwood commission deals with do involve workers that is or employees in the traditional sense and secondly in terms of the individuals named overwhelmingly they are people in supervisory or management positions so whilst it isn't part of the definition they are the nature of applications that have been brought to the commission which of course mean that is the only context in which either we deal with matters or the bullying occurs in workplaces but that's the sort of sample that end up coming to the commission What's important about that I think is that we do see examples where all of the infrastructure is in place and this is particularly an issue for a larger workplace all the policies strategies and the training the reporting systems are in place but particularly for larger organizations where they have branch offices or regional locations you often find that there are sort of practices and approaches taken in the context of performance management or workplace change where the in a sense that the policy is certainly not applied in a practical sense and so local management don't follow the script and don't follow the approach and so it's back to Michelle's point about sort of inconsistent and unfair application of procedures and that's probably because management is one of the hardest jobs in the world it is a really hard job and anyone that sits in a position like mine I've been in that role I understand how difficult that is so I'm not sort of critical of management per se I understand it's an incredibly difficult job but one of the responsibilities is to manage people and to take care of people and to set up an appropriate culture in the workplace so the example I'm giving is the result of the organizations that have the right infrastructure but they don't live and breathe it in other words they don't drive it down through the through the organization so that it sort of becomes part of the culture and look for those of us that have been involved in work health and safety in some years or probably if we recall 30 years ago we really got serious in this country about work health and safety you're going to an organization and exactly the same dynamics would appear in terms of those sort of manual sort of based hazards so they sort of put in place policies but they didn't really apply them and you could go into a workplace and you'd know that this was not an organization that actually lived and breathed them in other places now you know that they actually do take this really seriously and every step of the process they take these risks seriously and they don't just go through the motions well I think in Australia and in other countries we're only learning to do that with hazards associated with the management of people but we're on that journey we've started and we're research and practical experiences starting to contribute to that and I think hopefully in years to come we'll see yes you can go into an organization say this is an organization actually takes these things seriously the policies, procedures, approaches and attitudes are actually hardwired in the organization well yeah managers have a lot of discretion in how they implement the policies and so in a large organization with multiple sites we have situations like this emerge but I might just flip this for a minute and talk about well what's the positive side of our research what we've found is if workers feel really safe to voice out to their manager and their manager takes personal responsibility for addressing the bullying situation then we can have a really good result it can escalate and it can de-escalate really quickly so workers need to feel safe that they've got someone to talk to and that person can have a meaningful impact on the situation and in the case of managers who do take that really seriously it can resolve things early on in the piece which I think is really the only solution for bullying absolutely we should focus on prevention and then on early intervention because after that it becomes really difficult to get a good outcome yes and I'd agree with bullying by the time a bullying complaint or notification comes through or an application a lot of damage has already been done people are on both sides and around psychologically damaged more often than not and I think if we can pull it upstream to leaders if leaders of organisations are leading and demonstrating that they're really clear and serious about a particular system I use an example many many times where you would not tolerate none of us in this room would tolerate an unguarded saw going like a like a tree saw in the doorway we just would not go near it and yet too often we walk past appalling systems appalling behaviours and we don't do anything and I think if we can if every person in an organisation now you don't have to be a manager to be a leader in an organisation if every person in a leadership role can take a stand to what good systems and good practices look like because some of us have a responsibility to speak up because others might not be able to but we can work because who don't have the experience or confidence to speak up about systems and that's psychological risk in the workplace if they don't speak up then those of us who can should and I think if we can work as much upstream as possible then we prevent any of those and some of that is managing the psychosocial risks so they're very clear there's a lot of research behind the systems and the assessment tools that say if you do these things then you will reduce the psychological risk in your workplace that's very clear so I think today is around designing outbullings so I'm hearing a series of messages coming through Peter you were focusing a lot on management behaviour I'm also hearing some messages about we started to introduce the idea about some of the antecedents the precursors like workload stress I wonder if we can delve down a little bit more about other particular aspects of the work design that we should be focusing on to design it out and how do we do that so what we've continued after I spoke about analysing 342 bullying complaints and that really revealed the risk pockets in organisation we've actually translated those risk pockets into a risk assessment tool and so this risk assessment tool is focused at understanding those areas of the organisation that aren't functioning well it's got a really good evidence base behind it we can discriminate between high, medium and low risk teams for a whole range of work health and safety outcomes but it comes down to 11 core job activities as I mentioned right from rostering and scheduling a three to the way that the work unit is led and the relationships with individuals, managing the tasks and workload, managing underperformance and so on so they would align really well with those broader psychosocial assessment tools that you talked about Bernie that assess demands and controls so we can have a multi-layered approach so the tools are there, we can do evidence based risk assessment for psychosocial hazards in the workplace that can feed into risk control strategies how's that information gathered? Is it surveys? How do you find out what people are actually thinking is going on in that workplace? Our particular tool is what's called a Behaviourly Anchored Rating Scale so it's like a survey but it's a graphical tool in a traffic light style so we have red, yellow and green zones so it's really easy to use but surveys are another approach. So Bernie you mentioned that people would work this tool So the people that work risk assessment it's like a social risk assessment tool it's available on the Work Health and Safety Queensland website, it was developed a number of years ago and it's freely available at the moment you can download forms and teams can do the particular assessment, it's more suitable to businesses that have got at least 20 employees but you could do it in a different way as a focus group for teams with less than just to have the conversations it's freely available, we're at the moment developing it as a digital tool to make it a little bit easier for people to use So Peter, you don't use surveys do you and how do you how do you investigate the concerns that are brought to you? Yeah, well look the further commission is a tribunal so we're not a regulator, we don't do investigations we don't sort of do research although our approach to managing anti-bullying applications and our approach to dealing with them, recommendations we might make or orders we might issue are informed by exactly the sort of research that you've just heard about so what we do is we deal with applications as a tribunal in other words we are required to provide natural justice and to hear an application not investigate a complaint so with all that comes with that we generally try and have early interventions and in particular through more informal processes and the reason for that is that our look our experience is that the earlier and more informally matters like this can be resolved the higher the probability that there will be a working relationship left at the end of the process and the whole objective of the fair work commission's role here is to make orders or bring about preventative approaches so it's all about prevention we do look backwards in other words we do have to make findings about whether or not there's been repeated unreasonable conduct that creates a risk to health and safety we only do that to find our jurisdiction if you don't mind the legal term so we have to find our jurisdiction but the reason we do that is only so we can look forward because what we need to do is actually look forward and say well is there a future risk of repeated unreasonable conduct then what are the sort of preventative strategies and approaches that already put in place and what are the preventative strategies that you recommend right well either by recommendation or orders look the fair work commission's approach has been firstly to recognise that there are some in a sense some immediate issues there are likely to be some immediate behaviours that have brought about an application so let's assume that the commission considers or it's agreed that there has been unreasonable conduct then the first thing is to deal with the conduct but secondly and much more important is to recognise as I said earlier it's all occurs in a particular context it's all about infrastructure it's all about making sure the policy settings are right the training is right the relationships are right the role definitions are right depending on of course what it is in the particular context that arises one of the challenges of course is to have appropriate grievance procedures and in a sense every organisation who wants to deal in this area needs to have a proper formal grievance process but my experience and the experience of other members has been that frankly what's important as part of this process is that there almost needs to be permission given from the top for individuals that feel that they're being bullied to raise matters informally and raise them earlier because the moment a formal complaint is made it has particular consequences for the individual, for the organisation and for the person that's named and in a lot of occasions that's appropriate because the behaviour is considered to be so serious it needs to be dealt with informally so it can be properly investigated etc but there's a whole class of behaviour that if it was actually dealt with earlier and more informally the results are going to be much better much better for workers much better for the individuals who would otherwise be seen as the people conducting the conduct and better for organisations so it's hard, look it's really hard to sort of hard to get into a policy, you can have it there I'm actually talking about the culture of the workplace that accepts that it's not the end of the world if a worker has concerns about the way they're being treated and they need to be able to raise that in a way that doesn't sort of polarise parties I accept it's hard to write that down but when you see it, when you see it in practice you will recognise it and Michelle and Bernie we're hearing Peter's message that early interventions are key but also de-escalating things early and opening up conversations in workplaces Absolutely I couldn't agree with more with what the commission has said once it becomes too far escalated it's really difficult to de-escalate it and there's good qualitative case study research that will support that we've talked already about they need to feel safe to voice out so having a culture that allows people to speak up is really important otherwise it just goes underground and then we don't see it until it becomes too far gone to kind of resolve but it really does go back to the culture it goes back to people speaking up or other people speaking up on their behalf it goes to people being able to have really tough conversations early on to send the right signals but what we haven't really wanted towards is this prevention idea so this is already talking about little things that are bubbling up and getting bigger but we need to go right back to that prevention stage organizations need to actually assess the risk for bullying in their organization they need to assess the way works designed how demanding it is, how much control there is they need to use the tools available so that they can actually change the work situation and then if we've got this resilient work situation we can have little conflicts and things bubbled up and they can be resolved without escalating into ongoing bullying so prevention is actually the number one message and that prevention has to be assessed and targeted at those organizational factors yes I'd agree if we can prevent bullying and for me it always comes back to the legislation requires safe systems of work not that it's about compliance with the legislation but we know as commissioners said before that with physical hazards we've really grown over the last couple of decades about how we identify how we mitigate the risk how we then review and we improve so that the legislation is structured like that most occupational work health and safety legislation so if we consider the psychological risks in a workplace in the same way we can have those conversations because the legislation also requires communication and consultation so if we think about it from a prevention perspective we want to identify and then mitigate risk we talk to our teams we talk to workplaces talk to each other and then set up the systems that works because it's not enough to just have a system it has to be one that works and then there is an issue and then something crops up that we may not have identified it comes into okay well what's the review what's the process that we've put in place that allows people to say actually this doesn't quite work so therefore what's our process for reviewing that having those conversations again and implementing more effective controls to just ground this back into the law so you get that off the hook for a moment and then I turn to my other two experts so Peter and then Bernadette would you mind just clearly articulating what does the law say in this in both those two jurisdictions I'll start with the fairway commission and its predecessors has been dealing with with alleged bullying circumstances to probably its entire existence when was it set up? well over 100 years ago so it's a very longstanding tribunal in terms of different remits but effectively it's the same tribunal from the conciliation and arbitration court of the early 1900s but what we now describe as bullying behaviour has been a feature of unfair dismissals and grievances and other issues for many years in 2014 the Federal Act was amended to give the commission what I would describe as a preventative anti-bullying jurisdiction and so what that involves is the definition of bullying about a number of times it allows an applicant worker to bring a claim if they genuinely believe that they have been subject to bullying conduct in a workplace either directed to themselves or a group of workers to which they belong so that's the fundamental basis of the jurisdiction but that involves claims about behaviour by individuals either one or more individuals in a workplace those individuals need not be workers that is the applicant has to be a worker or an employee or a contractor otherwise in the workforce but the individuals that are claimed to have committed the unreasonable conduct they are individuals in other words they just need to be people, individual people so generally in our experience they are workers or other people in the workplace but they may not be they may in fact be visitors to the workplace they may be contractors they may be clients they may be in the care facility they might be the partner or other relative of a client and if they conduct themselves in a repeatedly unreasonable context then that could be the basis for an application so it's a very wide remit indeed although the majority of matters we've dealt with are employees in more traditional workplaces our job is to try and get those matters resolved in a preventative context that is trying to preserve the employment of contractual relationship and potentially to make orders to do so so it's entirely preventative jurisdiction we don't award compensation we don't make findings of guilt or otherwise we don't lock people up what we do is we try and preserve and maintain or make safer ongoing workplace relationships so that's the remit of the fair work commission fairly precise but also recently restrained whereas health and safety laws across Australia how do they deal with this issue? Well the health and safety laws the definition of bullying is the same as what's used in the fair work act so repeated and unreasonable behaviour that's going to present a risk to health and safety so in the in most work health and safety legislation across Australia even though it's not all WHS it's consistent particularly the WHS legislation there is an obligation for a person conducting a business or undertaking to protect the health and safety of workers their health is defined in the WHS legislation as physical and psychological so that's where bullying sits it sits as a psychological risk and business owners persons conducting a business or undertaking have that responsibility to make sure but also workers have responsibility that they by their acts or emissions don't impact others and other people who come into a workplace for example other contractors or visitors also have a responsibility it's just not something that we've done as well as we should and we're not as as a community as comfortable working through psychological risks which include bullying behaviours as we are with managing physical risks my observation is and I'm sure across the panel would see that more and more we are asked by businesses what can we do we know that this is a really important issue we know that we don't want to psychologically injure our workers and we don't want them injuring each other so what do we do and what can we do as the first steps I might respond to that question actually so bullying plays out amongst people in organisations but it really arises from the organisational system that's pretty clear from this morning's discussion so we might work on how managers behave towards their workers we might work on how workers interpret their role and their behaviour in relation to that but that's still leaving the solutions at the behavioural level so in addition to how workers interpret things in behaviour and how managers act in relation to their role we need to look at the system factors so that might be what is the actual supervision structure is it whoever is most senior on the day or are there nominated teams that have good high quality supervision we could look at the performance management system itself so that could be really important in shaping performance expectations in giving people really timely feedback role clarity role clarity absolutely and if there is a performance problem in managing that in a fair and consistent way so that the worker knows what they're doing and how to improve and is given a reasonable chance and support to do that so there's a whole range of things we can do with these organisational systems and structures I'd really like to see what happens if we have an organisation that rewards both performance against budget and other operational objectives but behaviour as well what would happen if we were rewarded behaviour and conduct equally with those other productivity objectives that would really send a strong signal that the way people behave around here is really important so we need to map up supervisor behaviour, employee behaviour with these structural aspects of the system if we're going to have effective sustainable bullying prevention through today's discussion all of you at some level have touched on the issue of performance management and Peter I think you mentioned that it's a common precursor to complaints that come to you is being bullied because you're a poor performer or does it lead to a poor performer what's the evidence saying what are you finding in practice? That's a really difficult question can I say bit of column A and bit of column B in reality it's both there would be little doubt based on research and I think our collective experience that if a worker considers genuinely considers that they're being treated differently or being subject to conduct then they're not likely to be concentrating on the main game they're likely to be distracted they're likely to be absent from work more often than they would otherwise be so that will lead to performance issues and then there'll be a performance management process and if you already consider that your subject of unregional treatment that'll at least in part shape your particular lens you'll look at everything through that lens and then in a sense it's a self-fulfilling proposition so that's true but look it is also true that allegations of bullying are made in the context where there is reasonable performance management being conducted that is some worker's perception is that they don't like negative feedback they don't like being told how to do something or when to do something and so it's in that context that allegations are made so look it is a bit of both hearing something there is we've all been we all have performance agreements we all have to deliver at work so something about how performance management processes done is that right how the messages are provided to the worker absolutely that's a key risk area for workplace bullying is the performance the formal performance management process so we might have a performance development framework which is setting expectations and having a review and allowing people to grow and develop but when we turn to this formal performance management under performance the way that that process is stepped out sometimes people perceive that as being used to bully against them and sometimes there is reasonable performance management being conducted which nevertheless coincides with the bullying complaint but the way that plays out is a high risk area for the perception of bullying and I think I read in your research Michelle that a surprising number of places don't even have performance agreements in the first place so how would workers know what the performance standard is if they don't have a performance agreement that creates a big risk and as we've talked about role ambiguity can emerge from that risk lack of feedback and so on is just creating this big risk area for bullying so it's definitely something to have in place it has to be really clear for workers it has to be charged really fairly by managers giving feedback to people is not actually a really easy skill so that's a good area for training to support supervisors so in a way managers are getting a little bit of heat here in this conversation but organisations really need to be able to support their managers to do their job well providing the right resources such as the frameworks and providing the right kind of training like how to have difficult conversations how to give really good feedback and I think those sometimes are the ingredients that are missing in organisations. I just want to briefly turn to the role of the person who's witnessing this going on and if they have some duties if I'm in a workplace and I'm seeing bullying going on do I have some duties to report it to do something about it? Yes I believe they do because under the work health and safety legislation and consistent legislation across Australia workers have obligations for the health and safety of themselves by their accelerations for other workers and others so I think that as observers we have a responsibility and as I said before particularly when we know that the other person may be a more vulnerable person in a workplace they might be a younger worker they may be a new worker they might be someone who's inexperienced either in the industry or where the language skills are slightly different to the norm and therefore that might add a layer of vulnerability that might not be the case for some of the rest of us and also some people are just not confident so therefore I believe that as bystanders we do have an obligation to step in and identify as we would for any physical hazard if we saw a physical hazard that presented a risk to health and safety we have an obligation as workers to actually identify that and to report that so as we should for psychological risks What's the health consequences? Michelle you've looked at the international literature of people There's really good evidence across many many studies in the order of more than 70,000 different participants across all these studies Bullying is related to a whole range of mental health problems for workers from depression to anxiety psychosomatic complaints like tummy problems and headaches post-traumatic stress symptoms There's a whole range of effects on the mental health of targets The most serious of course is contemplating suicide or suicide attempts and that's a really really tragic circumstance but a real one that can arise after exposure to workplace bullying So we're talking about a really really serious issue here and good quality international evidence on the severe health impacts that people face after being exposed to bullying and also from witnessing bullying so witnesses to bullying as well and being in that unhealthy work environment maybe not feeling like you've got a voice to be able to speak out or that something will be done but also create health consequences for individuals Work cover data shows that bullying complaints predominantly about any psychological health claims really cost at least four times more than a physical injury claim or cost and the recovery is four to ten times longer for a person if they ever recover and if as Michelle said the outcome isn't suicide which unfortunately it sometimes is because for a person who suffers that psychological injury in a workplace they can't see a way past that and the outcome is suicide and so we need to make sure that we take this seriously it costs businesses it costs industry so much more but it costs individuals in the workplace who are injured and then their families and their communities so much more than a physical injury Vicki Smith I'm a WHS consultant with the LGA workers' conference game it's more of a comment rather than a question that we've used the analogy of physical hazards bullying is really really difficult to report I've been bullied myself and I've stood up for people who are being bullied and I've witnessed it and so we have to acknowledge it is something that's very very difficult because it's about relationships and it's that so it's very easy to report a physical hazard but it is very difficult to actually report something that's being bullied or that there's bullying actually going on and to actually deal with it we put together registers for hazards often there's not psychological injury will be on there I did work for Families SA for 20 years and when we did some research on what our injuries were that was psychological you would expect that it would have been from the occupational violence that we were working with one of the things we sort of discovered is that it was a lot of it was to do with bullying so the psychological injuries were coming from bullying rather than from the clients so it's more about a comment it's actually really difficult to deal with and report and you don't want to upset your team and so there's a whole thing Taking that comment on board how do we encourage people to speak out? So prevention is absolutely essential because it's a really good point that you make it's such a difficult there's a lot of stigma and fear associated with reporting about becoming the next target or things getting worse and people can put their head down and just try and keep going so absolutely prevention by addressing those risks in the way that we've talked about I'd also like to add if we can move it upstream if we can move those conversations upstream to prevent bullying or any other psychological injury in the first place and have it as open discussions in workplaces just make it a normal part of what we do to talk to each other about how we will need to work what do we need to do in a day together to work successfully because none of us go to work to be injured we go to work to do most of us go to work to do a great job and if we can have those supports in place and have the risks managed as they should be then we've got a much better chance of achieving that Just before we go to our next question, you in one of your conversations with me was sort of saying so much of it's about kind of not saying it he said she said but just saying can we see what's needed to get this job done here and identifying that have you got some practical advice? Well first of all I want to acknowledge the comment is absolutely right this is a difficult area anything that deals with human beings and human behaviour and expectations is inherently difficult to go off the shelf solutions absolutely understand that there's also just in a sense compound the issue is that there's a lot of focus on the sort of businesses that have sort of formal policies and structures and training Australian community is essentially business community is essentially made up of a whole series of small businesses and of course those challenges are different and in some respects even more challenging because you don't have the infrastructure with the management expertise but it's also much more difficult in a small workplace to raise issues so you need slightly different solutions but the nuanced solutions there are about those informal processes and indeed some of the strength of small businesses is that they because they don't formalise these things complaints or concerns can actually be raised in a way that's far less threatening than it might be through a formal structure and it's not it's not a no-go area it's not something we shouldn't be dealing with but yes we need to realistically accept there are challenges here Hi my name is Jessica I'm from the tourism commission but this is from a kind of almost personal level I guess as an HR practitioner one of the things that I face quite a lot is people asking my advice about what they should do in their own businesses or in their own workplaces and touching particularly on the aspect so I know of an incident for example where a worker has been injured and has gone to the manager in that workplace and asked for an incident report and there's nothing like an incident report and nobody has acknowledged that there's been an incident or even so much has asked that person if they were okay and my response to that of course is quite strong because it's my professional sort of standard that kind of thing is addressed so I guess what I would like to know is what advice can I give then to who they go to and how that kind of thing is addressed because it's then a more systemic problem throughout that organisation and also going back to that manager not having any management support or training in development but it's not my job to kind of step in and do that for another business I think your response in relation to it is the manager's capacity to understand people as I said before people are put in positions where they don't really know how to manage people it's not one of their strengths and unfortunately by virtue of just their work they get put into positions to do that I think there are a number of resources across probably all of our websites that would potentially really assist people to put some of those systems in place or at least have the conversations and ultimately it really is if we can figure out how to communicate with each other in a workplace what do you need to successfully do your job without an injury and what do I need not just from you but also what do I need for myself for example the other day where an employer said she's got a team and she didn't realise that when she's challenged she behaves in a particular way where she starts to sort of scurry around and she's hurrying and she's muttering and she said she didn't realise that she was actually stressing out her team until they had a conversation and then they talked about because she may not realise she's starting to do this because she's going for that out, she's challenged she's got deadlines herself and they came up with an agreement that when she's like that somebody will just say just breathe and it's simple they don't have to come and say you're stressing me out, you're making me feel bad it's just breathe which says to her your behaviours right at this moment I appreciate that it's sort of a simplistic view but for a lot of organisations it just might work for some and I think these are the less frequent where people go out of their way to make people feel bad and they go out of their way a lot of times it's just that they don't understand their own behaviours so I think it has to come back to workplaces having those conversations and they are, I acknowledge conversations, I've had some of those myself with different outcomes but I think that's where we have to start particularly small businesses If there's one message you'd like to give our audience listening online what is it about how we design and build a bully free workplace Michelle I think there needs to be a fundamental shift in how workplace bullying is viewed let's move away from the idea that it's a personality conflict that it's an interpersonal problem and let's move to the reality that it arises from the organisational system and it needs to be managed proactively in that way I completely agree if we move it out of a space where it's a personality conflict and look at it as a system that we can manage, we can control if something doesn't quite work we review it and we shift the controls and we introduce something new like it could be a new team member again we look at that, we have the conversations but I think ultimately it's about every workplace having a conversation about what systems would we need so practically what do we each need to work successfully in this organisation and ultimately for the organisation's benefit that I will not be injured and the organisation will be productive and efficient And Peter Difficult area no off the shelf solutions but really really big pay off for workplaces for individuals and for our society if we can get better at this I'd like to thank all three of you and our lovely audience from Adelaide for joining us today for what I think needs to be an ongoing conversation I know that in our conversations we acknowledge Australia has come a long way in the last couple of decades but we certainly, I think we do all agree we've got a lot further to go so thank you very much and I'd like to close now, thanks Thank you