6 Suggestions for Managing Harmful Workplace Behaviour

Harmful workplace behaviour has become a critical compliance and cultural priority for Australian organisations. Given the increasing regulatory requirements for organisations to proactively manage harmful workplace behaviour and related psychosocial risks, one of the most common questions we’re receiving at Mibo is “What should we be doing in this space?” In partnership with the team at Australian Psychological Services, we’ve developed six evidence-based suggestions for effectively managing workplace behaviour.

Before We Start: What Is Harmful Workplace Behaviour?

Understanding what constitutes harmful workplace behaviour is the foundation for effective management. Harmful workplace behaviour encompasses a range of actions that can cause psychological or physical harm to workers, including:

Violence and Aggression: Physical violence, threats, intimidation, or aggressive behaviour from colleagues, managers, customers, or other workplace participants. This behaviour creates immediate safety concerns and serious psychological impacts.

Non-Sexual Harassment: Repeated, unreasonable behaviour directed toward a worker or group that creates a risk to health and safety. This behaviour might involve persistent criticism, humiliation, or exclusion based on characteristics other than sex or gender.

Sexual and Gender-Based Harassment: Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favours, or other unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature. Gender-based harassment includes offensive or demeaning conduct based on a person’s gender, sex, or sexuality. This behaviour is now a specific regulatory focus across all Australian jurisdictions.

Bullying: Repeated, unreasonable workplace behaviour directed toward a worker that creates a risk to health and safety. Bullying represents one of the most common harmful workplace behaviours reported to Australian regulators and significantly impacts worker psychological health.

Discrimination: Unfair treatment based on protected attributes such as age, gender, race, disability, or other characteristics. Discriminatory behaviour violates both work health and safety laws and equal opportunity legislation.

Counterproductive Workplace Behaviour: Actions like incivility, rudeness, undermining, gossip, or passive-aggressive conduct that, while perhaps less severe than bullying, still damage workplace relationships and psychological safety. These subtle forms of harmful behaviour often go unaddressed but contribute significantly to overall psychosocial risk.

1. Assess Respect at Work Climate

Proactively managing workplace behaviour begins with understanding your current organisational climate around respect, safety, and prevention. Rather than waiting for complaints or incidents to reveal problems, organisations should systematically assess behaviour climate as part of their psychosocial risk management approach.

At Mibo, based on the expert guidance of the team at Australian Psychological Services, we include an evidence-informed measure of harmful behaviour organisational climate prevention and response as part of our Psychosocial Risk Assessment Tool.

This climate assessment evaluates workers’ perceptions of:

• Management commitment to preventing harmful behaviour
• Effectiveness of existing prevention measures
• Perceptions of gender equality and DEI climate
• Safety of reporting processes and trust in organisational response

Measuring respect at work climate provides baseline data, identifies cultural risk factors enabling harmful workplace behaviour, prioritises areas requiring intervention, and establishes metrics for tracking improvement over time.

A poor respect at work climate indicates systemic issues requiring higher-order controls like cultural change and leadership development, not just policies and training. Understanding your climate helps target behaviour interventions effectively.

2. Risk Assess Harmful Workplace Behaviours

Australian work health and safety legislation requires organisations to assess risk, not merely identify hazards. Simply knowing that “bullying occurs” (a hazard) doesn’t constitute adequate risk assessment. You must understand the nature, severity, frequency, and impact of harmful behaviour in your specific context.

Include harmful workplace behaviours in your comprehensive psychosocial risk assessment, evaluating each type of harmful workplace behaviour separately (bullying, harassment, violence, discrimination) rather than aggregating them into a single category. Different behaviours require different control measures.

Ideally, include de-identified follow-up questions for workers who report exposure to harmful behaviour regarding:

• Nature of the behaviour: What specific actions occurred? This helps distinguish between, for example, one-off incivility versus sustained bullying campaigns.
• Source of behaviour: From manager? Colleague? Customer? Client? Different sources require different control strategies.
• Frequency: How often and for how long has this behaviour occurred?
• Impact experienced: What effects has this behaviour had on the worker’s health?

This detailed harmful behaviour risk assessment provides actionable intelligence for developing targeted control measures and demonstrates to regulators that you understand your specific workplace behaviour risk profile.

3. Implement Evidence-Informed Prevention Measures

Prevention is always more effective than response. Evidence-informed prevention measures address the organisational and cultural factors that enable harmful behaviour rather than simply punishing individuals after harm occurs.

Communicate Strongly Expected Workplace Behaviour Standards

Clear, consistent communication about acceptable and unacceptable workplace behaviour sets expectations and establishes cultural norms. This includes comprehensive behaviour policies, regular communications reinforcing standards, visible consequences when standards are breached, and positive recognition of respectful workplace behaviour.

However, communication alone is insufficient as a control measure under the hierarchy of controls—it must be accompanied by systemic changes.

Increase Commitment to Diversity, Inclusion, Equity, and Gender Equality

Research consistently shows that diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplaces experience less harmful workplace behaviour, particularly harassment and discrimination. Prevention measures include:

• Improving diversity at all organisational levels, particularly leadership
• Addressing gender imbalances in male or female-dominated environments
• Creating inclusive cultures where all workers feel valued
• Implementing equitable systems for promotion, recognition, and reward
• Addressing power imbalances that enable harmful behaviour

These organisational changes represent higher-order control measures that eliminate or reduce root causes of harmful behaviour.

Ensure Senior Leadership Modelling of Appropriate Workplace Behaviour

Leaders set the tone for acceptable behaviour. If senior leaders engage in bullying, tolerate harassment, or demonstrate disrespect, workers receive clear messages that such workplace behaviour is acceptable regardless of written policies.

Prevention requires visible senior leadership modelling including demonstrating respectful workplace behaviour in all interactions, holding themselves and peers accountable for inappropriate behaviour, prioritising psychological safety in decision-making, and authentically committing to workplace behaviour standards.

Establish Safe Harmful Workplace Behaviour Reporting Avenues

Workers won’t report harmful workplace behaviour if they fear retaliation, don’t trust the process, or believe nothing will change. Safe reporting requires multiple confidential reporting channels (not just direct manager), anonymous reporting options where appropriate, clear protection from victimisation, transparent processes, and regular communication about what happens after reports.

Safe reporting channels enable early intervention before behaviour escalates to serious harm.

4. Establish Suitable Response Measures

Even with strong prevention, harmful workplace behaviour may still occur. How organisations respond when it does significantly impacts both the affected individuals and overall workplace culture.

Establish and Communicate Confidential Support for Staff Who Experience Harmful Workplace Behaviour

Workers experiencing harmful behaviour need access to immediate trauma informed support. Response measures should include:

• Access to confidential counselling through Employee Assistance Programmes
• Support from trained contact persons or harmful behaviour advisors
• Reasonable adjustments to work arrangements during investigation
• Clear information about support options and how to access them
• Protection from further exposure to harmful behaviour

Support should be available regardless of whether workers make formal complaints, recognising that some may need support without wanting formal investigation.

Establish Appropriate Response Procedures When Staff Report Harmful Workplace Behaviour

When workers report harmful behaviour, organisations must respond appropriately and promptly. Response procedures should include:

• Trauma-informed processes
• Acknowledgment of the report within defined timeframes
• Preliminary assessment determining appropriate response level
• Fair, impartial investigation processes where warranted
• Interim measures protecting all parties during investigation
• Clear decision-making about outcomes and consequences
• Communication to relevant parties about results and actions
• Follow-up with affected workers after case closure

Inadequate responses to harmful behaviour reports create secondary harm, potentially worse than the initial incident, and signal to the broader workforce that reports are futile.

Any investigations should also explore upstream systemic factors that are creating the conditions for inappropriate behaviour so those systems can be addressed to reduce future instances of harmful behaviour.

5. Provide Appropriate Harmful Workplace Behaviour Training

Training about harmful behaviour serves multiple purposes: prevention, awareness, capability building, and compliance demonstration. However, training alone is insufficient—it must support higher-order control measures like cultural change and work redesign.

Formal Leadership Training on Workplace Behaviour Management

Leaders need enhanced training covering recognising early signs of harmful behaviour in their teams, preventing harmful behaviour through work design and team culture, responding appropriately when witnessing inappropriate workplace behaviour, receiving and investigating behaviour complaints, supporting affected workers during and after incidents, and understanding their legal obligations regarding workplace behaviour.

Leadership training should be mandatory, regularly refreshed, and evaluated for effectiveness in actually changing workplace behaviour management practices.

Employee Harmful Workplace Behaviour Awareness Training

All workers should receive training on what constitutes harmful behaviour across all categories, reporting channels and how to use them, available support services and how to access them, their rights regarding workplace behaviour including protection from victimisation, bystander intervention techniques for witnessing harmful behaviour, and organisational response processes.

Training should be included in induction for new workers and refreshed regularly for all staff, particularly when behaviour policies or procedures change.

6. Develop a Harmful Workplace Behaviour Prevention Plan

Formal documentation of your harmful workplace behaviour prevention approach demonstrates proactive management and supports compliance. In Queensland, written prevention plans for sexual harassment and sex or gender-based harassment are mandatory from 1 March 2025. Even where not legally required, prevention plans represent best practice for all types of harmful behaviour.

Essential Components of a Workplace Behaviour Prevention Plan

Your harmful workplace behaviour prevention plan needs to contain:

Information on How Staff Can Make a Complaint: Multiple reporting channels, step-by-step process instructions, information about confidentiality and victimisation protection, and support available during reporting process.

How Complaints Will Be Investigated: Investigation process overview, timeframes for different investigation stages, principles of natural justice and fairness, roles of investigators and decision-makers, and interim measures during investigation.

The Processes That Will Be Undertaken: Preliminary assessment and triage, investigation procedures for different severity levels, evidence gathering and interviews, decision-making criteria and authority, and possible outcomes and consequences for substantiated behaviour breaches.

How Relevant Parties Will Be Informed of Results: Communication to complainant about outcomes, information to respondent about findings, broader communication where appropriate (protecting confidentiality), and follow-up and monitoring after case closure.

The prevention plan should be reviewed at least every three years, after any behaviour incident, when organisational changes occur, or upon request from health and safety representatives.

Taking Action on Workplace Behaviour

Proactively managing harmful behaviour requires systematic approaches addressing prevention, detection, and response. Organisations that wait for complaints or incidents before taking action fail both their legal obligations and their workers.

By assessing respect at work climate, conducting thorough harmful behaviour risk assessments, implementing evidence-based prevention measures, establishing robust response procedures, providing appropriate training, and documenting approaches through prevention plans, Australian organisations can genuinely reduce harmful behaviour while meeting compliance obligations under strengthened regulations.

The cultural and business benefits extend well beyond compliance…workplaces free from harmful behaviour experience improved psychological safety, enhanced productivity and innovation, reduced turnover and absenteeism, lower workers compensation costs, and stronger employer reputation.

Connect with Mibo

Reach out if you’d like to chat about proactively managing harmful workplace behaviour. Our Psychosocial Risk Management Assessment includes evidence-informed respect at work climate measurement, comprehensive harmful workplace behaviour risk assessment, and targeted control measure recommendations addressing behaviour risks in your organisation.

---