A workplace bullying complaint can be one of the harder complaints for an employer to assess.
The employee may describe months or years of conduct. There may be dozens of examples. Some events may be disputed, some may be agreed, and others may involve ordinary management decisions that the employee experienced as unfair or unreasonable.
Before beginning a workplace bullying investigation, the most useful thing an employer can do is separate the broad experience being described from the specific conduct that needs to be examined.
What does workplace bullying mean?
Under the national Fair Work framework, bullying at work generally involves repeated unreasonable behaviour towards a worker or group of workers that creates a risk to health and safety.
Reasonable management action carried out in a reasonable way is not bullying.
Those legal concepts matter, but an investigator does not need to turn every investigation into a legal opinion. The practical investigation task is usually to establish the conduct said to have occurred.
What was said or done? How often? In what circumstances? Who was present? What documents or messages exist? Which parts are agreed and which are disputed?
Once the facts are established, the organisation can consider what those findings mean in the relevant legal and policy context.
Do not reduce a bullying complaint to a label
Employees often use the word bullying because it describes how the experience felt to them.
That does not mean the employer should dismiss the complaint if the legal definition is not immediately obvious. It also does not mean the employer should assume bullying has occurred simply because the label has been used.
The better approach is to identify the actual behaviours being complained about and assess those fairly.
A complaint might include repeated public criticism, exclusion from information, aggressive comments, threats, unreasonable demands or humiliation. It might also include performance feedback, changes to duties or decisions about work allocation.
Each needs to be understood in context.
Clarify the allegations before interviewing people
Bullying complaints can become unwieldy very quickly if every sentence in a complaint becomes a separate allegation.
A clear set of allegations helps everybody.
The complainant can see which conduct is being examined. The respondent knows the case they need to answer. The investigator knows what evidence is relevant. The organisation knows what the final findings actually relate to.
Where a pattern is alleged, it may be appropriate to group related conduct rather than creating an artificial list of tiny allegations. The structure should reflect the complaint, not make it harder to understand.
Look at the pattern as well as individual incidents
A workplace bullying investigation may require the investigator to consider both specific events and the broader pattern alleged.
An isolated comment may look different when considered alongside several similar interactions over time. Equally, a long list of complaints does not automatically establish a pattern if the events are unrelated or supported by different evidence.
Chronology can be particularly useful. It helps show what happened when, whether concerns were raised at the time, how people responded and whether the conduct changed or continued.
Evidence is often wider than witness interviews
Bullying complaints frequently involve evidence created before anyone knew there would be an investigation.
Emails, Teams messages, text messages, diary entries, meeting invitations, performance documents, rosters and contemporaneous complaints may all help provide context.
That does not mean every document proves the allegation. It means the investigator should consider the evidence that genuinely bears on the disputed facts rather than relying only on who appears more confident in an interview.
Reasonable management action still needs context
A common tension in bullying complaints is the distinction between misconduct and management action.
Managers are allowed to manage. They can give feedback, set expectations, allocate work and address performance. But the manner in which those things are done can still matter.
An investigation should not begin with the assumption that a management decision was either automatically bullying or automatically reasonable. The conduct, context and way the action was carried out need to be understood.
When independence can help
An independent workplace bullying investigation may be useful where the complaint involves a senior manager, the People and Culture team has already been heavily involved, the relationship history is complicated or there is low confidence in an internal process.
It can also help where there are many allegations and the organisation needs somebody to bring the evidence together without being pulled into the wider workplace conflict.
If you have received a workplace bullying complaint and need help deciding how to investigate it, I can assist with the initial assessment or conduct the independent investigation itself. The aim is to establish the facts clearly, without making the process larger or more adversarial than it needs to be.