Workplace Bullying Risk with Mary Cullen

Workplace bullying isn’t rare — it’s a persistent, under-recognised business risk that quietly erodes culture, trust, and retention.

In this episode of the HRchat Podcast, host Bill Banham speaks with Mary Cullen, Founder and Managing Director at Insight HR and host of The HR Room, to unpack the findings from the Insight HR Irish Workplace Bullying Report 2026.

Together, they explore what workplace bullying really means in practice — and why the legal definition often clashes with employee expectations. Mary shares patterns she sees time and again: complaints most frequently involve managers, the emotional toll affects both the accuser and accused, and unresolved issues often lead to exits, damaged trust, and long-term cultural harm.

The conversation goes beyond definitions to tackle what organisations get wrong. Many companies have policies, but far fewer invest in meaningful training, conflict resolution skills, or investigation capability. Bill and Mary also challenge the idea of “zero tolerance,” particularly when high performers are protected despite poor behaviour.

You’ll learn why complaints can spike during restructuring or performance management cycles, why malicious complaints are less common than assumed, and the single most effective step organisations can take to reduce risk quickly: train managers properly.

In this episode:

•  What the latest Irish data reveals about bullying complaints 
•  The difference between bullying and poor management behaviour 
•  Why legal thresholds create confusion in real workplaces 
•  The impact on mental health, performance, and retention 
•  Where most organisations fall short (even with policies in place) 
•  Why “zero tolerance” often fails in practice 
•  How to reduce risk quickly with limited budget 

If you care about psychological safety, employee relations, and building a culture where people actually want to stay — this episode is essential listening.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Welcome to the HR Chat Show, one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros, talent execs, tech enthusiasts, and business leaders. For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media, and visit hrgazette.com.

SPEAKER_03 0:25

Welcome to another episode of the HR Chat Show. Hello, listeners. This is your host today, Bill Bannham. And in this episode, I'm joined by the awesome, wonderful, fantastic Mary Cullen, founder and managing director over at InsightHR. With more than two decades of experience advising organisations across Ireland, Mary has built a reputation as a trusted voice in HR strategy, workplace culture, and employee relations. Mary is also the host of the HR Room. If you haven't listened to it yet, I would strongly recommend it. It's awesome. It's Ireland's longest-running HR podcast and leads a thriving community of HR professionals through regular events and insights. And in this conversation, listeners, we're going to focus on findings from InsightsHR's Irish Workplace Bullying Report 2026, which has uh just landed actually as we're recording this. And we're going to unpack what the data tells us about the scale of workplace bullying today, why it remains an underrecognized organizational risk, and what HR leaders can realistically do to address it. And uh by the way, Mary will also be on stage at Disrupt Dublin in just a few weeks as we record this, along with her colleague and fellow podcast co-host, the awesome Dave Corkery. Mary, how are you doing? Welcome to the show today.

SPEAKER_00 1:48

I'm I'm great. Thanks, Bill. Thanks for having me. And what a lovely introduction.

Mary Cullen And InsightHR

SPEAKER_03 1:54

So, as we like to do on this show, before we get into the hard-hitting stuff, Mary, what what have I missed? Tell us a bit more about yourself and your your career background.

SPEAKER_00 2:03

Oh, wow. Um, well, I've been, I hate to say it, but in HR for over 25 years. I think it may be slightly longer, but I'm sticking with the 25 years anyway. Um, started very much as a generalist, uh, worked in finance and tech before I left and set up my own HR consultancy insight HR. Um, we're now one of the leading HR firms in Ireland, and we work uh with business in Ireland and the UK, but we also work with um businesses who have operations, maybe France, Italy, US, wherever, that have Irish operations and need Irish specific advice for those operations. Um, and we do everything. We do everything in the HR space, other than health and safety. Although what we're going to talk about today is a health and safety issue. We come at it from a HR perspective.

Report Data On Complaint Volume

SPEAKER_03 3:00

Very good. Thank you, Mary. Uh, I'd just like to add um Insight HR supported our relaunch event in Dublin in February. They're supporting that uh the event on May 21st as well, which is coming up in just a few weeks, as I mentioned. And listeners, they are a delight to work with. They're a lovely bunch of people. So I would strongly recommend checking them out. Okay, Mary, let's get into the hard-hitting questions now then. Uh let me start with um let's start with the big picture. But based on your latest report, then, how common are bullying complaints in Irish workplaces today?

SPEAKER_00 3:35

Uh, they're very common. We just launched a survey and we asked more than 2,000 HR and business leaders across the wide sector uh in Ireland what their experiences have been with bullying, both personally and professionally, how often they've dealt with complaints themselves, um, how confident they are with dealing with those complaints, and what level of experience and training they have uh to actually deal with those complaints. And I hate to say it, but uh 85% of all the respondents have handled at least one bullying complaint in their career. Um nearly half of those respondents have handled between three and ten complaints, and that gives you an idea of the level and extent of bullying complaints that we see. Um, and nearly two-thirds of all respondents have dealt with the complaint in the past 12 months. So, what we're seeing is a trend where either the level of complaints that HR professionals and business leaders are dealing with have either stayed the same over the last five years or have actually increased. And that gives an indication of the level and extent of the problem there actually is. An organization like the World Health Organization categorizes bullying as workplace violence and see it as epidemic in a sense, in that it is so broad and it has such an impact on the health and the well-being of individuals that it's it's it's a world health issue, not just an Irish-specific issue.

SPEAKER_02 5:19

Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Chat Podcast. If you enjoy the audio content we produce, you'll love our articles on the HR Gazette. Learn more at hrgazette.com. And now back to the show.

SPEAKER_03 5:35

Okay. Um, just a quick follow-up to that then. Um the the term workplace violence, that sounds like a quite strong term. Can we can we maybe put some definition around what we mean by bullying here? So, for example, sometimes you get quite an assertive leader, someone who's pushy, uh very driven, got their own ideas about where a particular team should be going, um, and they they're quite forceful. I guess the question is, when when is pushy bullying?

SPEAKER_00 6:04

Yeah, I mean bullying is is quite a specific thing in that it's repeated, inappropriate uh behavior that has the effect of undermining undermining an individual's dignity in the workplace. And that I guess is the subject of uh a lot of controversy around what does that actually mean in real terms? So, what might be a concrete example of bullying? A one-off incident typically isn't. So, yes, you can have a pushy manager, maybe it's a pushy manager who's complaining about your workplace performance, um, and maybe not all that subtle in how they're doing it, depending on the level of communication skills or people skills that they actually have. But unless there's an established pattern of inappropriate and repeated behaviour that undermines dignity, and that's kind of a worldwide definition and approach to it, um, then it may not amount to bullying. In Ireland, we have some significant case law, and the bar in Ireland is extremely high when it comes to proving bullying uh in the workplace, and they have broken down that definition quite clearly. Um, so those three elements must be part and parcel of what somebody has seen. So a repeated pattern must be targeted, it must be directed at you as an individual, and it must have that, I guess, sinister element to it. It's not simply I'm not happy with how you're performing at work or I'm not a very nice person. We can't make in HR, we can't make people nice. You know, they're if they're not nice, they're not nice. We can't influence that, but what we can do is influence what is acceptable within our workplaces, irrespective of the jurisdiction.

Are Complaints Increasing Over Time

SPEAKER_03 7:54

Okay, thank you very much. So are complaint levels changing over time, Mary? Are are we seeing an increase, a decline, or just better reporting? What does that look like?

SPEAKER_00 8:07

Yeah, the the the problem isn't going away. Um and the majority of respondents that um completed our survey, um 55% feel that the level of bullying complaints in their organization have either stayed the same or increased in the past five years. Um only 14% had seen a decrease in complaints, and only 12% reported no complaints. So that's huge. That's huge. Um, and a worrying sign given how advanced Ireland is in terms of its uh code of practice on bullying, in terms of its definition around bullying, in terms of the level of case law around bullying, it's not improving despite all these things being in place.

SPEAKER_03 8:54

So when complaints are raised, Mary, what tends to happen next? And and how does bullying influence retention and employee exits? And I guess I'd add to that, uh, we talk a lot on this show about differences in the ways that different generations work. Are we seeing, for example, Gen Z more likely to stand up and make complaints about the ways that they're being treated compared to, say, millennials or boomers or other generations?

SPEAKER_00 9:24

Yeah, so what we're seeing is that the majority of the complaints really don't come in from entry-level employees, although there is some level uh of entry-level complaints. Now, that might just be simply a confidence issue. Someone new to the workplace doesn't know what to expect and doesn't understand necessarily what the treatment that they're receiving actually is. So we're not seeing uh, you know, a massive amount of complaints at that entry level, which is where we would have our Gen Z. We are seeing the majority of complaints being made against managers, supervisors, senior managers, uh rather than uh anybody else, and they tend to be coming from their direct reports, which kind of feeds back into your earlier question. You know, what makes a manager a bully versus how does somebody manage an individual who they're not happy with and or who isn't performing in some way or whose conduct or behavior is out of sync with what the organization expects from them? And it it's a fine line. And I have seen over the years, um as being an experienced investigator myself, but I have also seen over the years that um when people get accused, so you're the manager and you're being accused of something by maybe a direct report, um, people are genuinely shocked and and stand back and say, I'm I'm no bully. I I'm not someone who bullies people in work. I've got a job of work to get done. And this person is a troublemaker, this person is someone who's got performance issues, this person is always moaning or complaining about something. Now I'm the target of of something that they're doing. And that's why it gets so complicated and so difficult to actually resolve it.

SPEAKER_03 11:20

And you mentioned earlier in one of your previous answers, um, the the legislation in Ireland means that it's terribly difficult to prove bullying. Does that mean that actually it's it's easier to be the accused than it is to be the accuser in in terms of getting a result?

SPEAKER_00 11:40

No, I would I wouldn't think so. And you know, to be honest, I've seen the mental health of both the accuser and the accused um deteriorating over the course of an investigation because it's extremely stressful if you're accused of bullying someone, but it's also extremely stressful if you're the recipient of inappropriate behavior. I cast my mind back years ago to um my very first HR job where I was in a standalone position. And another manager made very clear to me day one when I started with the company that she had interviewed for the role I took, and the management team hadn't allowed her to move from the role she was in into the role she wanted because she was too valuable to the organization where she was. And following that, she repeatedly undermined me as a young person in front of the management team through CCing all in sundry. She'd ask a question, I'd give an answer, she'd come back and disagree, but she'd CC all the management team in her disagreed answer, so on and so forth. And there were many, many examples of that kind of behavior towards me. And I didn't understand it. I didn't understand what was actually happening, but I became obsessed with working harder, doing better, performing, and working longer hours, uh, obsessed talking about this particular individual at home, and it having a serious impact on my confidence, my well-being, my ability to do my job. And I consider myself a pretty hardy person, um, and because a lot of people in HR are hardy people, but that doesn't mean you're immune to someone targeting you for whatever reason uh they have themselves. Did I ever complain? No. Did I ever raise an issue with my manager? No. Um, but I did plan my exit from that organization uh with the view that for me it was unsustainable to continue working in an environment where I felt my whole confidence was beginning to be undermined. It's quite serious when it comes to people. And like I say, I I have watched people over time um and see and seen their mental health deteriorate. Um and you know, it's not a pretty sight. I've seen people lose their hair, I've seen people lose weight, not able to sleep, relationships break up. I've seen all sorts of things uh in this sphere.

Policies Exist Training Often Does Not

SPEAKER_03 14:23

Yeah, I mean, I I personally can completely relate. When I was in my early 20s starting my career, I had a couple of um bosses who I I guess I look back now and I I describe them as bullies and it affected things like losing weight, um, not sleeping. I felt like I had to be in the office until 10 o'clock at night sometimes. Um now I'm a bit of an old codger, I would never allow myself to be in that kind of situation again. Absolutely not. But you know, you look back now, don't you? Um with uh with with with a different perspective. So from your experience, where do organizations most often fall short when handling bullying issues?

Pressure Points And Malicious Claims

SPEAKER_00 15:00

Yeah, so the when we asked our um the respondents about things like policy and training and uh their complaint handling and maybe informal resolution mechanisms, um, the vast majority of respondents actually had a policy in place around workplace bullying. And so that was 94%. And I wasn't surprised by that because often in HR we think let's develop a policy and make sure that we have a good, robust policy in place. And then we'll just leave it sit there on our internal networks, or we might print a booklet, or we might train people at induction around workplace bullying. But surprisingly, 38% of respondents said their organization doesn't conduct any training that addresses workplace bullying at all, not even at induction, uh, and not for management, not for HR, um, and not for anyone in the organization, so that they could understand at what point their behavior might become inappropriate. Um and of those that do conduct training, 62% said it only happens at induction, with only 44% conducting training at regular intervals. Um and while HR people and business leaders recognize that their organizations needed to provide additional support or guidance for managers to handle conflict earlier, um they aren't doing that. Over 54% said that they're not actually doing that. So that'll give you uh, I suppose, a sense of how this whole area is underinvested in. So if you go back to the World Health Organization describing workplace bullying as a health and safety issue, uh, it is well known and documented in Ireland, for example, that it's a health and safety issue. But unlike something where you know you're operating machinery or you're operating equipment or you're sitting at a desk or you're looking at a computer screen for hours of the day, um, organizations are taking those physical uh health and safety issues much more seriously than they're than they're taking an issue that could affect someone's psychological safety, their mental health and their well-being, and also having an impact maybe on their physical health too. And if you think about that, it doesn't make a lot of sense in the context of health and safety of our people in our workplaces if we don't invest in it, we don't think about it, we don't train people, we don't train managers, we don't train individuals around well, what what is inappropriate behavior? Because you and I, Bill, may both um be HR professionals, um, but we've both grown up in different home environments. We will have seen different things. Um, you may come from a family that has a joking culture, and I don't. And you say things to me that I find offensive or repeatedly do something um that you think is banter, good fun, a bit of crack, uh, and yet my mental health is starting to deteriorate because of the way in which you're treating me. Um, and that just gives an example of the wide variety of things that can constitute bullying, and I guess the danger zones for managers and individuals, because the last thing anyone wants to be accused of is bullying someone, it damages your reputation, uh, it damages your standing within an organization, it causes you stress and distress. And um we are seeing that most people who are either accused of bullying or accusing tend to leave the organization after an investigation or after a complaint has been made.

SPEAKER_03 19:15

We've rightfully um mentioned so far, we've highlighted the fact that bullying in the workplace can affect performance levels. I wonder from from the research that you guys have done, from the conversations that you've had, is there any correlation in terms of when the reports of bullying um come up? Um are they related to performance? What I mean by that is if you've got an employee and they know that they've got a performance review coming up, for example, in the next couple of months, and they know that their performance has been down over the last little while, are they more likely to make a complaint uh around bullying, whether or not that's that's an honest complaint?

SPEAKER_00 19:58

Yeah, in my in my career to date, and look, we have a specialist division at Insight HR that um carries out workplace investigations. And I think Susie Lowe, one of my colleagues, did the talk at the last Disrupt Dublin around uh workplace investigations and gathering evidence. Um, in our experience, it's really rare to find that someone made a malicious complaint and that it was based on something as simple as you know not wishing to get negative feedback at a performance review. Often at pressure points in an organization, so say for example, there's a downsizing or a restructuring or um a disciplinary process or something that an employee is finding deeply uncomfortable, you might see complaints being raised at that point in time. But from an investigator's perspective, we will always be looking at has someone made this in good faith or is this a malicious complaint? Every single manager, every single person who's ever been accused of bullying um tells me and my team when we investigate it that they're innocent. Uh a bit like people, I guess, who go to jail too, everybody's innocent, and yet it's our job to establish fact has something actually occurred which falls into the definition of bullying, or is something unpleasant happening in the workplace, such as you're feeling under pressure because you are in trouble, um, and that in itself is not considered bullying, and is is well documented, certainly in Irish law, as not being bullying. Um, so you can't stop someone raising a complaint. Um, you've got to address it once it arises. Um, but in our experience, training managers, training employees, uh, far from increasing the number of complaints, it actually reduces and acts as a preventative measure because we all understand what we can. can't do in the workplace.

Culture Hiring And Zero Tolerance

SPEAKER_03 22:02

Okay, very good. So beyond policies and procedures then, what does it really take to build and sustain a respectful, psychologically safe workplace culture? And maybe as part of your answer, I'd I'd be keen to hear from you, does that start with is it as early as the hiring process? So for example, is it important to identify possible bullies, folks who who perhaps don't fit with the the the the company culture during that initial interview process?

Investigation Skills And Report Writing

One Practical Fix Train Managers

SPEAKER_00 22:31

Yeah, of course it's important that you vet um people carefully but what I find when it comes to bullying and in organizations where bullying is prevalent. So of course you might deal with isolated incidents of bullying or bullying complaints. But in organizations where there's a that culture of bullying um they tend to support and reward and progress certain types of behaviors that are acceptable to the organization or are acceptable to leadership. So yes it does start at recruitment but it depends on your leadership, its approach to something like bullying and whether or not and I see this all the time in policies this word zero tolerance. I'm sure you've seen it yourself Bill you know we take a zero tolerance approach to bullying uh which is wonderful but what does it actually mean in reality? And if you ask any HR person what's a zero tolerance approach to bullying you'd be surprised that actually they don't have a zero tolerance approach to bullying that sometimes you're actually recognizing rewarding and encouraging that kind of behavior why because it gets work done why because you're the best salesperson in the organization you're bringing in millions. Why am I going to support a junior report who's complaining about your behavior towards them when you're a top performer in the organization and in some cases that's where we see um those kind of behaviors not only tolerated but also rewarded and encouraged oh now see that's interesting in a past life I worked for a a big sales association over in Canada and and you just mentioned uh if you're if you're a salesperson um are there certain departments which are more susceptible to bullying complaints so sales department for example you're probably gonna have a lot of extroverts you probably have a lot of people are working under a lot of pressure and they probably care about the ROI they they care about the results um with more minutiae with with with um with more focus perhaps than a more chilled HR department is it do you guys see anything like that? No I don't see any particular patterns other than I do know that the majority of complaints made tend to come at managers. So it tends to be the CEO, the senior leaders the heads of departments the supervisors the management player um and sometimes you know when you when you look at these things I'm quite stunned by what managers might say to individuals um in terms of how they treat them or shouting at people or disrespectful behavior in some way. But again even if I shout at you once Bill if I lose my cool now lose my temper with you shout at you on this podcast uh and you're my direct report uh it might be very unpleasant for you you might feel pretty humiliated and angry with me um but that one-off event is not bullying and from a HR perspective you would be dealing with Mary's inappropriate behavior on a live podcast which let's hope I never get there but you'd be dealing with that kind of behavior under maybe your discipline policy but you wouldn't be looking at that as bullying um even though I was humiliated undermined disrespected hurt angered embarrassed just because it's a one-off event it means it's not bullying. So we did see from our survey that um a lot of the respondents showed a high level of confidence in their ability to handle a bullying complaint 63% said they were confident or highly confident in all areas of complaint management. And the majority said that they have actually conducted workplace investigations. 71% said that even though only 56% of the same group said they had received any training in how to do it. And of all the areas where people said they struggled or identified struggling it was in the area of report writing um with only 29% of the respondents saying that they didn't struggle with any aspect of the investigation. And I know as someone who's conducted more of these investigations than the majority of people that there are some investigations that you really and truly will struggle with. And if you don't train people on how to conduct an investigation then how are you going to just know how to do it naturally?

SPEAKER_03 27:43

Let's let's let's let's finish off with a with a takeaway from our listeners um I think that's always important if you could leave HR listeners and sorry HR leaders and and business executives who are listening to this episode today with one immediate practical action to reduce workplace bullying risk what would that be Mary?

Closing Thanks And Subscribe

SPEAKER_00 28:02

It would be about training managers so one thing I would do if I had a very limited budget and I couldn't get to training the whole organization which in the ideal world yeah that's what you do you train everyone from your board your CEO your man your leadership team your management team and all your employees you you'd have awareness campaigns running and you'd regularly train the whole organization. Let's say your budget's really limited and you can't get the buy-in to do all of that because let's be fair it costs money to do it and I would train your managers I would train them I would make sure that they understood understood clearly what behaviors are and are not acceptable from themselves first in the workplace and then to look at well what do we do when we get a complaint? How should we handle it and what should we do? If something's complex, if it involves the CEO, I tell you what all internal HR teams run away from it because let's be fair do you want to do an investigation on the CEO and find that the CEO is a bully? Absolutely not there's very few HR people I know that would be brave enough to do it. And so some investigations just get outsourced automatically simply because of the the level of complexity involved in them. But if you want to avoid getting there in the first place train your people and all of your people and that that's the best preventative strategy you can take policy alone doesn't do it although you have to have the policy in place.

SPEAKER_03 29:38

Mary that just leads me to say for today thank you very much for being my guest on this episode of the HR Chat Show.

SPEAKER_01 29:45

It was my pleasure thank you for having me thanks for listening to the HR Chat Show. If you enjoyed this episode why not subscribe and listen to some of the hundreds of episodes published by HR Gazette and remember for what's new in the world of work subscribe to the show follow us on social media and visit hrgazette.com