What Does Workplace Bullying Look Like Online?

Short answer: Workplace bullying has not gone away, it has changed address. The manager who used to criticise somebody in front of the team now does it in the team chat, where it stays all day. The colleagues who used to leave someone out of a conversation now leave her out of the group where decisions get made. The behaviour is the same. What has changed is that you can no longer see it happening, and it no longer stops when she goes home.

In short:

• Every familiar form of workplace bullying has a direct equivalent on a screen.
• The online version follows people home, because it arrives on the phone they use for everything else.
• There are no witnesses, but there is usually a record, which changes what you can do about it.
• Most of it looks trivial one message at a time, which is exactly why it goes unreported.
• Managers can be taught to spot it, but somebody has to explain how these tools actually work first.

What workplace bullying used to look like

Most people picture the same thing. A manager who criticises somebody in front of the whole team. A colleague who talks over one person in every meeting. A group who go to lunch and never ask the same person along. Somebody who sets impossible deadlines and then complains about the result.

ACAS describes bullying as unwanted behaviour that makes someone feel frightened, humiliated or offended, and it has looked broadly like that for as long as people have worked together.

The important thing about the old version is that other people saw it. Somebody witnessed the meeting. Somebody noticed who was not invited to lunch. When an investigation started, there were people to ask.

What does workplace bullying look like online?

Take each of those familiar behaviours and move it onto a screen. Nothing about the intent changes, but everything about how it lands does.

Public criticism used to last as long as the meeting. Now a manager posts it in the team channel, where it sits in front of everyone for the rest of the day, and where anybody who joins later can scroll back and read it. The person on the receiving end knows that, which is why a single critical message online can feel heavier than the same words said out loud.

Exclusion used to mean nobody asking her to lunch. Now it means nobody adds her to the group chat where the real conversation happens. She finds out about decisions after they are made, cannot explain how she keeps missing things, and starts to look disengaged to anyone who does not know why.

Constant petty criticism has become messages at all hours. Something arrives at eleven at night, and although nobody has said she must reply, everybody in that chat can see whether she has. The pressure is real and completely unwritten.

Micromanagement has moved onto the tools themselves. Some managers watch the little green dot that shows whether somebody is at their desk, or use read receipts, which are the small notes telling a sender that somebody has opened their message. Checking how fast one person replies, and only that person, is monitoring dressed up as management.

Undermining is now almost silent. Her messages go unanswered while everyone else gets a reply within minutes. The same two colleagues put a thumbs-down on everything she posts. Everybody in that chat understands exactly what is happening, and nobody can quote any of it in a complaint.

And rumours have found the perfect home. A private group she is not in, but knows exists, does more damage than anything said to her face, because she has no idea what is in it.

Three things that make the online version harder

Those translations are close enough that you might expect the response to be the same. Three differences get in the way.

The first is that it never stops. Bullying in a corridor ended when she left the building. Bullying in a chat reaches her in her kitchen, on her own phone, at any hour, including weekends and holidays. There is no point in the day when she is safely out of range.

The second is that nobody witnesses it. A group chat on somebody’s personal phone has no administrator and keeps no records for the organisation. No manager will ever see what happens there unless a member chooses to forward something out. You cannot investigate a room you do not know exists.

The third works in the opposite direction, and it is the useful one. Although there are no witnesses, there is almost always a record. The messages exist. Dates exist. Order exists. That means a pattern can be shown in a way it never could when everything depended on what people remembered, provided somebody keeps the whole thread rather than one screenshot.

Why so little of it reaches you

Those first two differences explain most of the silence, but there is a simpler reason underneath.

Said out loud, any single incident sounds like nothing. He put a thumbs-down on her message. They did not add her to a chat. Somebody sent her a message at midnight. Each of those shrinks the moment she says it to a manager, and she knows that before she opens her mouth. So she waits for something big enough to be worth mentioning, and usually nothing ever is.

There is also the phone itself. Most of this happens on a device the organisation never issued, so the whole thing feels out of scope before anyone decides whether to raise it. That instinct is wrong, but it is completely understandable, and only you can correct it.

Then comes the problem that ends reporting altogether. Somebody raises something once, nothing visible happens, and everybody watching draws the obvious conclusion. After that your figures look healthy because they are empty.

What HR can do about workplace bullying online

HR teams handle the parts they own very well. The policy, the grievance process, the records, the manager training on difficult conversations. None of that needs replacing, and all of it applies to bullying that happens on a screen exactly as it applies to bullying in a corridor.

The most useful thing HR can add is far simpler than a new policy. Describe these behaviours out loud, by name, in the training you already run. Somebody who has never heard the pattern described assumes she is imagining it, or being oversensitive, or that nobody would take it seriously. Once she hears a room being told that exclusion from a group chat is a recognised form of workplace bullying, she recognises her own situation and brings it to you.

Two things go with that. Say plainly that a personal phone still counts as work, because ruling personal devices out of scope does not stop anything, it only guarantees you hear nothing. And ask people to keep the whole thread, with dates, rather than one screenshot, because a single message always looks trivial and the run of them rarely does.

One warning worth giving your leadership in advance. Do all this and your reports will go up. That is the sign it worked. An organisation that treats a rise as bad news teaches everybody to go quiet again within a month.

What HR cannot reasonably do is keep up with the tools. Nobody in your building tracks how a group chat behaves on a phone the organisation does not administer, what a workplace app shows about somebody’s activity, or how quickly something spreads once it enters a private group. That is not a gap in anybody’s ability. It is a different subject, and it changes every few months.

Where training comes in

That last gap is knowledge rather than process, which is why it has to come from outside.

Our training programmes fill it. A session shows how these apps and chats really work, what they reveal about a person’s activity, and how a pattern that looks trivial message by message becomes obvious when somebody reads the whole thread. It also covers what a manager should do in the first conversation, when somebody finally brings them something that sounds small. Kids n Clicks runs continuing support for corporate organisations.

Kids n Clicks has written about related ground in our post on misogyny in the workplace and about what wellbeing programmes tend to miss in our post on workplace wellbeing initiatives.

If you lead people, wellbeing or inclusion in your organisation, connect with Parven on LinkedIn or explore our training programmes to book a session for your team.

Parven Kaur is a digital parenting and online safety expert, and the founder of Kids n Clicks. She works with employers on the technology side of online harm and its effect on staff wellbeing. She won the Scottish Cyber Security Award, and she sits on the National Board of Advisors for Barnardo’s Scotland.