Dr Chloë Gough, Dr Iain Coyne and Professor Fehmidah Munir, of Loughborough Business School, began working with the UK Cabinet Office in January 2023.
Using a tool created during her PhD, Dr Gough has worked with 16 government departments in that time to “improve their readiness to prevent and address bullying, harassment and discrimination (BHD)”.
Readiness refers to how capable and authentically motivated employees within the civil service believe their departments are to effectively address and prevent BHD.
About 15% of workers worldwide experience some form of workplace bullying, posing a threat to their wellbeing and an estimated cost to UK employers of £13.75 billion annually.
The tool enables organisations to identify factors within the work environment that threaten the success of prospective interventions focussed on preventing and addressing BHD.
So far, the tool has been used by more than 6,000 civil servants. Dr Gough works directly within the Cabinet Office as Head of Organisational Readiness.
She said: “The best way to think of readiness for change is like a flower. When it struggles to grow, we typically change the environment and not the flower.
“But what we see in BHD intervention practice, is the repetitive process of planting flowers (interventions), watching them die, pulling them out and planting more, without considering how the soil (work context) is stifling growth.
“So, this work is very much focused on shifting this narrative and educating organisations on how to prepare that soil before planting anything.”
Each assessment is tailored to the organisation involved and comes with multi-levelled recommendations that tackle the identified, inefficiencies within each specific work context, that would otherwise derail an intervention.
Dr Coyne, the project lead, said: “Chloë has produced a very simple and rigorous pre-intervention tool which organisations can use to help them better address bullying at work.
“The action plans generated by the tool signpost organisations to the inefficiencies within the organisational ‘soil’ prior to intervention implementation and as a result organisations render themselves much more capable of successfully embedding anti-bullying initiatives in the long run. The long-term goal of the project is to make it available as a toolkit for businesses and organisations to use.”
Following the success of the project, the Cabinet Office has funded a one-year extension.
Jason Ghaboos, Director of the Cabinet Office, said: “The civil service is committed to tackling bullying, harassment and discrimination (BHD) where it arises.
“Dr Gough's work has provided a refreshing, innovative, insightful and impactful lens to approaching BHD in organisations by providing an ability to understand how to better prepare and plan BHD interventions.
“Providing the necessary framing to ensure efforts are significant, successful and sustained.”
The research team are in discussions with software developers to create an online administration, scoring and report delivery platform for the readiness tool – and they are in the initial stages of commercialising it, looking at licensing and business development.