Survey finds majority of bullied employees remain silent

A new survey of employees in the UK has found that the majority of those who endure harassment and bullying opt to remain silent about it.

That is the key finding of this survey from Culture Shift, a reporting and compliance website. It spoke to a total of 1,060 employees and 28% of them indicated that they had been the victims of harassment or bullying during the last year. However, 57% who had endured such experiences stated that they had not reported the abuse to their employer’s HR department.

This was particularly prevalent among those in more junior positions. 54% of them said that they did not bother reporting bullying because they did not believe meaningful action would be taken. When it comes to those in management roles, the figure was 27%.

Responding to the findings, Michelle Hartley of People Sorted said that they revealed a lack of trust among employees. She added that this represented a failure to build respectful and inclusive workplace cultures, and that awareness raising and policies alone would not fix that.

One thing that HR teams can do is to allow employees to report instances of bullying anonymously. Complaints of this kind need to be handled carefully though, so the expertise of a trained employee relations consultant in Northampton could be beneficial.

Hartley suggested further ways it could be tackled to HR Magazine:

“Culture is built through consistent behaviour. Leaders must be visible in calling out poor conduct, even when it is uncomfortable.”

She said that this, plus proper disciplinary action for offenders, would increase trust.