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From The Times
June 13, 2006

Do we mean business about bullying at work?
WHEN we started investigating whether organisations do enough to counter workplace bullying, we began by asking what they do about it. The answer, in many cases, is quite a lot. However, there are still too many examples of management sending out the wrong signals.

Some anti-bullying measures involve quite formal statements such as policy documents, which tend to focus on the sort of behaviour that is not acceptable, and values statements, which highlight positive behaviour. Interestingly, our research has identified a definite shift towards encouraging people to follow good examples, rather than exhorting them to avoid bad. We believe that this will be a more effective approach in the long run.

Other approaches try to create an anti-bullying environment by: promoting awareness schemes for managers and staff; creating ways in which issues can be raised directly; and employing internal and external specialists.

But whatever approach organisations take, they need to be careful not to send out the wrong message. Research has uncovered a number of ways that this can typically happen:

  • Insisting on formality. An informal approach does not preclude taking the problem seriously, and in some situations it can be more appropriate.

    So these are some of the negatives that we have identified. Fortunately we have also been able to find plenty of positive approaches:

  • Creating effective assessment and feedback mechanisms. The work discussed here represents the start of a much bigger project that will examine in much more detail what it is that makes some anti-bullying measures effective and others less so.

    Based on the speech that John Crawley, the director of products and services at Conflict Management Plus, will deliver at the PSPM conference tomorrow. www.conflictmanagementplus.com

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