Home featured Young pretty female boss threatening to her young handsome employee Advice Employment Legislation Featured Advice How to ensure workplace bullying doesn’t occur in your business Guest Author October 16, 2015 Chances are if you’re the owner of an SME, you don’t have a large corporate office or big team. You may not even have separate departments, which means that your small number of staff has to work closely with each other on various tasks to keep the business running. As a result, conflicts in the workplace – such as workplace bullying – can be catastrophic for the day-to-day operation of your business. So, what is workplace bullying? According to the Fair Work Act 2009, workplace bullying refers to repeated, unreasonable behaviour toward a worker by an individual or group of individuals. Workplace bullying includes, but is not limited to, verbal, physical, social or psychological abuse by an employer or employee and can happen in any type of workplace. Those affected by workplace bullying may become less confident about work, feel more stressed, anxious, and depressed, and lose trust in the workplace, which means their quality of work decreases. The consequences of workplace bullying not only affect the employee in question, but also your business. By being unaware of, or not taking appropriate action on, workplace bullying, you open the door to negative behaviour in the workplace and create a hostile work environment. The result? Your SME is susceptible to high employee turnover rates and even risk of lawsuits.