Dealing With Workplace Bullying

People rarely come to us saying they are being bullied at work. They come saying they cannot sleep, that they feel sick on Sunday nights, that they have started second guessing every email they send. It is usually somewhere in the third or fourth session that the actual picture emerges, and by then the damage has often been building for a year or more.

Workplace bullying is one of the most common things we see in practice and one of the least often named. Between us, Richard and Helena Boyd, we have spent 21 years working with people in Perth, and this article covers what bullying at work actually is under Australian law, what it is not, what you can do about it, and what recovery involves.

What Workplace Bullying Actually Is

The Fair Work Act 2009 gives a clear definition. Workplace bullying happens when a person or group repeatedly behaves unreasonably towards a worker, and that behaviour creates a risk to health and safety.

Three parts matter in that sentence. It has to be repeated, so a single incident, however unpleasant, sits outside the definition. It has to be unreasonable, which means a reasonable person looking at the circumstances would see it as victimising, humiliating, undermining or threatening. And it has to create a risk to health, physical or psychological, whether or not harm has already occurred.

Bullying can be intentional or unintentional. Some people bullying others know precisely what they are doing. Others have no insight at all and would be honestly surprised to hear the word applied to them. The law looks at the effect of the behaviour rather than the intent behind it.

What Is Not Workplace Bullying

This part matters just as much, and it is where a lot of workplace conflict gets miscategorised.

Reasonable management action carried out in a reasonable way is not bullying. That includes performance management, disciplinary action, allocating work, changing your duties, refusing leave, restructuring a team or ending an employment relationship. A manager telling you your poor performance needs to improve is doing their job, even when the conversation is uncomfortable.

The words doing the work there are reasonable and in a reasonable manner. Performance managing someone is legitimate. Performance managing someone through public humiliation, shifting targets, or a process designed to force them out is not. The line sits at how it is done, not whether it happens.

A single instance of rudeness, a personality clash, or one bad meeting is also not bullying. Workplaces contain difficult people. That is not the same thing as repeated unreasonable behaviour creating health and safety risks.

The Different Forms It Takes

Bullying in the workplace is rarely shouting. Most of what we see is quieter than people expect, which is part of why it goes unnamed for so long.

Verbal and psychological. Offensive language, belittling comments, unreasonable criticism, sarcasm dressed as humour, dismissing your contributions in meetings, spreading rumours about your private life, or constant unfounded questioning of your competence.

Exclusion and isolation. Withholding information you need to do your job, leaving you out of meetings or emails, moving your desk away from your team, or excluding you from workplace activities and work related events. This is one of the most damaging forms because it is almost impossible to point at.

Setting people up to fail. Deliberately inconvenient deadlines, workloads no one could complete, removing the resources needed for a task, then documenting the resulting failure. Or the reverse, giving someone nothing to do, which is equally destabilising.

Physical. Pushing, shoving, unwanted physical contact, blocking someone’s path, throwing objects or damaging property. Less common than the other forms and unambiguous when it happens.

Cyberbullying. Abusive or threatening emails, hostile behaviour in instant messaging channels, exclusion from group chats, or posting about a colleague on social media. Because it happens on the record, this is often the easiest form to evidence.

Practical jokes. Repeated pranks aimed at one person are bullying, regardless of how they are framed. If it always happens to the same person and they have asked for it to stop, the joke defence does not hold.

Upward bullying. A manager can be bullied by the people they supervise, through collective refusal to cooperate, undermining, or coordinated complaints. It is under reported because it feels absurd to raise.

Bullying, Harassment And Discrimination

These get used interchangeably and they are different legal categories, which matters when you decide where to take a complaint.

Bullying is repeated unreasonable behaviour creating a risk to health and safety, and it is covered by the Fair Work Act and work health and safety laws. The behaviour does not have to relate to any personal characteristic.

Discrimination is unfavourable treatment because of a protected attribute, including race, sex, age, disability, religion, pregnancy or sexual orientation. That falls under anti discrimination law and the Australian Human Rights Commission.

Harassment is unwelcome behaviour that offends, humiliates or intimidates, and it often overlaps with both. Harassment and bullying frequently occur together in the same workplace.

Something can be all three at once. Being repeatedly humiliated in meetings because of your disability is bullying, discrimination and harassment simultaneously, and you may have more than one avenue available.

In practice, bullying and harassment usually arrive together. Harassment in the workplace tends to be the more visible layer, the comment or the joke someone can point at, while the bullying underneath it is the pattern of exclusion and undermining that is harder to evidence. If you are documenting, capture both. The visible incidents are what make the invisible pattern credible to someone assessing it later.

Workplace Sexual Harassment

Workplace sexual harassment is unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature that a reasonable person would anticipate might make someone feel offended, humiliated or intimidated. It includes unwanted touching, suggestive comments, sexually explicit messages, repeated unwanted invitations and displaying sexual material.

Australian employers now carry a positive duty to take reasonable and proportionate measures to eliminate workplace sexual harassment, rather than only responding after a complaint. That is a meaningful shift. The obligation is to prevent, not merely to react. The Australian Human Rights Commission oversees this and can be approached directly.

Why Bullying Takes Hold In Some Workplaces

In our experience, bullying is rarely just one difficult individual. It is usually a person plus a system that permits them.

The conditions that let it flourish are consistent. Autocratic leadership styles where challenge is treated as disloyalty. A blame culture where mistakes need a culprit. Senior people who model hostile behaviour, which quietly authorises everyone below them. Poorly defined roles that create constant territorial conflict. High pressure with no outlet. And most reliably, a history of complaints going nowhere.

The other pattern we see is proliferation. Once bullying is established, some targets become perpetrators themselves, because in that environment it looks like the only way to stay safe. This is why bullying tends to spread through a team rather than staying contained to one relationship.

What It Does To Your Mental Health

This is the part we see most closely, and the effects are more severe than most people expect.

Anxiety comes first for almost everyone, and it generalises quickly. What starts as dread about one person becomes dread about the building, then about work generally, then about Sunday evenings. Many people we work with describe panic attacks, often beginning in the car park.

Depression follows for a significant proportion of people experiencing workplace bullying. It is not simply feeling low. It is the erosion of professional identity, the loss of confidence in your own judgement, and a persistent belief that you have become bad at a job you used to do well.

Sustained bullying can also produce post traumatic stress disorder. Prolonged, inescapable, interpersonal harm is exactly the profile that produces trauma responses, and we see hypervigilance, intrusive memories of specific incidents, and avoidance behaviours that persist long after the person has left the job. People are often surprised that a workplace could do this. Clinically it is unsurprising.

What It Does To Your Physical Health

The body keeps score of this. Chronic stress from bullying shows up as disrupted sleep, headaches, digestive problems, muscle tension and lowered immunity. People get sick more often and take longer to recover.

Existing conditions get worse. We regularly see clients whose chronic pain, autoimmune symptoms or blood pressure deteriorate over exactly the period the bullying escalated, and improve once it stops. If you are experiencing workplace bullying and your physical health has declined, those two things are related.

The Effect On Witnesses And Teams

People who witness workplace bullying are affected too, and this is consistently underestimated. Bystanders report anxiety, guilt about not intervening, and their own decline in wellbeing. Watching someone be systematically undermined while feeling powerless carries its own cost.

For the organisation, the effects are measurable. High absenteeism, high turnover, damaged team morale and trust, impaired concentration and work performance across the group, difficulty attracting people, and a reputation that eventually reaches candidates. Bullying is expensive well beyond the individual harmed.

What To Do If You Are Experiencing Workplace Bullying

Write it down. Start today, even if you never use it. Date, time, location, what was said or done, who else was present, and how it affected you. Contemporaneous notes carry far more weight than a reconstruction six months later. Keep them somewhere that is not your work computer.

Keep the evidence. Emails, messages, rosters, performance documents, anything showing the pattern. Forward relevant items to a personal address where you are permitted to.

Read your workplace policy. Almost every Australian employer has one, and it will name the process and the appropriate person to raise a bullying complaint with. Following the stated process protects you later.

Tell someone. A manager, HR, a health and safety representative, your union, or someone outside the chain if the person bullying you is your manager. If you do not feel comfortable talking to anyone internally, start externally.

Use the employee assistance program. Most Australian workplaces provide an EAP giving free confidential counselling sessions. It is confidential and your employer does not learn what you discussed.

Get your own support. See your GP and get the health effects on record, because that matters both clinically and if you later make a claim. And seek support from a mental health professional independent of your workplace.

Do not wait for it to resolve itself. In 21 years, we have almost never seen sustained bullying stop on its own. It escalates or it continues.

Your Legal Options In Australia

Fair Work Commission stop bullying order. If you are still employed, you can apply to the Fair Work Commission for an order to stop bullying. The Commission can direct specific behaviour to cease and impose practical arrangements. Two things to understand. It is forward looking, so it stops future conduct rather than compensating past harm. And you generally need to still be at the workplace, which means leaving first can close this door.

Work health and safety law. Under WA’s work health and safety legislation your employer has a duty to provide a workplace free from risks to health and safety, and that expressly includes psychological risk. WorkSafe WA is the regulator and can investigate and issue penalties where an employer has failed to address bullying incidents.

Workers compensation. Psychological injury caused by workplace bullying can be compensable through WorkCover WA. These claims are more contested than physical injury claims, which is exactly why documentation and early GP involvement matter so much.

Anti discrimination avenues. Where the behaviour relates to a protected attribute or involves sexual harassment, the Australian Human Rights Commission or the WA Equal Opportunity Commission may be the better path.

Unfair dismissal or general protections. If you have been dismissed, or treated adversely for raising a complaint, different provisions apply and time limits are short.

We are psychotherapists rather than lawyers, so please treat this as orientation rather than legal advice. Get proper advice early, because several of these avenues have strict deadlines.

If You Witness Workplace Bullying

Witnesses matter more than they think. Research consistently finds that bystanders often side with the perpetrator, usually through fear rather than agreement, and that isolation is what makes bullying so effective.

You do not have to confront anyone. What helps is simple. Check in with the person privately. Say you saw what happened, because being believed is enormously stabilising when someone is starting to doubt their own perception. Write down what you observed. Refuse to participate in exclusion or gossip. And report bullying incidents to the appropriate person, particularly if you have more standing than the target does.

What Employers Are Required To Do

Australian employers must provide a safe workplace, and psychological safety is not optional. In practice that means a clear anti bullying policy that people actually know about, training so managers can recognise bullying behaviour, a complaints process that is properly independent, prompt investigation, and action taken on findings.

Employers should also be treating psychological hazards the way they treat physical ones, by identifying them before harm occurs. That means noticing the team with the turnover problem, the manager who generates a steady stream of resignations, and the department where nobody makes eye contact in meetings. These are health and safety risks with a recognisable profile, and they are visible well before a formal complaint arrives.

The failure we see most often is not the absence of a policy. It is a policy that exists on paper while complaints quietly go nowhere. That teaches everyone watching that the behaviour is permitted, which normalises it faster than anything the person bullying could do alone. It also makes the next person far less likely to speak, which is how a single unaddressed situation becomes a culture.

Recovering From Workplace Bullying

Leaving the job does not end it, and that surprises people. We work with clients years after the event who still flinch at a certain tone of email, or who have taken roles well below their capability because the confidence has not come back.

Recovery generally involves three things. Restoring your sense of reality, because sustained bullying makes people doubt their own perception, and having the pattern named accurately by someone outside it is often the first relief. Working with what the body is still holding, since hypervigilance and bracing do not resolve through insight alone, which is why we work somatically as well as through talk therapy. And rebuilding professional identity, separating what was done to you from what you concluded about yourself.

That third piece takes the longest. The bullying may have lasted eighteen months. The belief that you are not good enough can last considerably longer if nothing addresses it.

Two things we tell almost everyone. Do not make major career decisions while you are still inside it, because your judgement about your own competence is currently being distorted by someone with an interest in distorting it. And expect the recovery to be uneven. People often feel worse for a period immediately after leaving, once the adrenaline that was holding them together is no longer needed. That dip is normal and it is not a sign the decision was wrong.

What This Looks Like In Practice

These are composite examples drawn from our clinical work, with identifying details changed.

A woman in her forties came to us for anxiety and insomnia after eighteen months of a new manager. She had no language for it and assumed she was failing. When we mapped the timeline, the pattern was unmistakable, including meetings she was removed from and a workload no one could have carried. Naming it accurately was the turning point. She lodged a complaint, and separately we worked on the panic that had started arriving in the car park before work.

A man in his fifties in a trade left a job after two years of exclusion and public criticism. He was three months into a new role and still could not sleep before shifts. The bullying had stopped, but his nervous system had not registered that. We worked somatically on the bracing pattern he was still carrying into every workplace, and the sleep came back before the confidence did.

A team leader was being bullied upward by two people she supervised, through refusal to cooperate and coordinated complaints. She had told nobody because she believed it would look like she could not manage. Getting her to name it to her own manager took four sessions. The situation resolved within a month of her raising it, which is more common than people expect once bullying is brought into the open.

Frequently Asked Questions

The questions we get asked most often about bullying at work, and our honest answers.

Is One Incident Considered Bullying?

Under the Fair Work Act, no. Bullying requires repeated unreasonable behaviour. A single serious incident may still breach other laws, including those covering assault, discrimination or sexual harassment, so it may be actionable through a different route.

Is Performance Management Bullying?

Not on its own. Reasonable management action carried out in a reasonable manner is expressly excluded, including performance management and disciplinary action. It becomes bullying when the process itself is unreasonable, such as shifting expectations, public humiliation, or a process clearly designed to force someone out.

Can You Be Bullied By Someone You Manage?

Yes. Upward bullying is real and more common than the statistics suggest, because managers rarely report it. The same definition applies regardless of who holds the seniority.

What If Nothing Changes After You Report It?

Escalate outside the organisation. Depending on the circumstances that means the Fair Work Commission, WorkSafe WA, a workers compensation claim, or a discrimination body. Get advice on which fits your situation, and act promptly because time limits apply.

Should You Just Leave?

Sometimes leaving is the right call and we would never talk someone out of protecting themselves. Two things worth knowing first. A Fair Work Commission stop bullying order generally requires you to still be at the workplace. And leaving does not automatically end the psychological effects, so plan for the recovery as well as the exit.

Getting Support After Workplace Bullying

Workplace bullying is a health and safety issue, not a personality problem, and it is not something you should have handled better. Repeated unreasonable behaviour that creates a risk to your health is prohibited under Australian law, and the fact that it is common does not make it acceptable.

If you are in it now, document everything, use your employer’s process, and get advice early. If you are out of it and still carrying the effects, that is not a sign of weakness. It is what sustained interpersonal harm does to a nervous system, and it responds well to the right treatment.

We work with adults across Perth and online, combining talk therapy with body based work, and workplace bullying is one of the areas we see most. No referral or mental health care plan is needed, and nothing you tell us goes back to your employer.