Zero Tolerance For Workplace Bullying: What Your Policy Must Actually Do

What Zero Tolerance for Workplace Bullying Actually Means

Most Australian organisations say they have zero tolerance for workplace bullying. Very few can say what it means in practice, and that gap is where the trouble starts.

Used well, zero tolerance is a statement about the standard rather than about the penalty.

It says the organisation does not accept this behaviour, will not quietly tolerate it in high performers, and will act when it is raised. That is a real and useful commitment.

Used badly, it is read as a promise of an automatic outcome: report it and the person will be dismissed.

That is the version that causes damage, because it is not a promise any employer can keep.

Before going further it is worth being precise about what the standard applies to.

Workplace bullying has a specific legal meaning: repeated unreasonable behaviour towards a worker that creates a risk to health and safety, with reasonable management action carried out reasonably excluded.

Our guide to workplace bullying and conflict covers the test, including the point that intention is not part of it.

The Problem With Zero Tolerance as a Phrase in a Policy

Here is the difficulty, and it is a practical one rather than a semantic one.

A zero tolerance policy does not remove your obligation to run a fair process, and it does not make a dismissal automatically defensible.

The Fair Work Commission still asks whether a dismissal was harsh, unjust or unreasonable, taking into account matters like length of service, the seriousness of the conduct, whether the person understood the standard, and whether people in comparable situations were treated the same way.

That has been tested. In a 2022 matter involving Queensland Rail, an employee was reinstated despite breaching a zero tolerance alcohol policy, with the Commission weighing his age and forty years of service against the breach.

In another 2022 matter involving DP World Brisbane, a dismissal was upheld where the breach was extreme and the role was safety critical.

Those are drug and alcohol cases rather than bullying cases, but the principle is the same for any zero tolerance policy: the Commission treats it as a starting point, not a conclusion.

So an organisation that announces zero tolerance and then, quite properly, investigates, considers the circumstances and issues a warning rather than dismissing has not done anything wrong.

It has just visibly failed to do what its own policy appeared to promise.

The consequences of that gap are worth naming.

• The person who reported feels betrayed: They were told zero tolerance and they watched something less than that happen. They usually do not report again, and they tell colleagues
• Managers become reluctant to act at all: If the only sanctioned response is the most severe one, a manager facing a first, moderate incident has no proportionate option and often does nothing
• Your own document is used against you: Where the policy promises an outcome you did not deliver, that inconsistency becomes a point in a claim

What to Keep From the Zero Tolerance Instinct

None of the above is an argument for softening. The instinct behind zero tolerance is right, and three parts of it should survive into whatever your policy says.

• No exceptions for seniority or performance: The commonest failure of a bullying standard is not that it is too weak on paper, it is that it is not applied to the person who brings in the revenue. Everybody in the organisation can tell you who that person is
• No tolerance for the slow version: Zero tolerance is usually understood as applying to obvious incidents. The behaviour that does most damage is the sustained, low-grade version that never produces a single reportable moment
• Nothing is too small to respond to: Zero tolerance for the behaviour means acting on the first instance, not waiting for the pattern that meets the statutory test. The work health and safety duty engages before the Fair Work test is met

What a Zero Tolerance Policy Must Contain, Clause by Clause

A workplace bullying policy is not a statement of values.

It is an operational document that has to work when somebody is upset, a manager is defensive and nobody can remember what they agreed to.

• A definition that matches the law: Repeated unreasonable behaviour creating a risk to health and safety. Say plainly that intention is not required, because that is what stops a complaint being closed on the basis that the manager meant well
• An explanation of reasonable management action: This protects your managers and it prevents the policy being used to resist ordinary supervision. Set out the three parts: it must be management action, it must be reasonable, and it must be carried out in a reasonable manner
• Examples, including the quiet ones: Exclusion, withholding information, work set up to fail, sustained cold-shouldering. Anyone can recognise shouting
• What is not bullying: A single instance of rudeness, a difficult performance conversation, a decision someone disagrees with. Saying this openly makes the rest of the policy more credible, not less
• Who it covers: Employees, contractors, labour hire, volunteers, students on placement, and conduct involving customers, clients and visitors
• Where it applies: Work premises, client sites, vehicles, work trips, work functions, and messages, email and group chats including outside hours
• How to report, with more than one route: At least one that does not require going through the person’s own manager, since that manager is the source in a majority of cases
• What happens after a report, and how long it takes: Who receives it, who decides, what the person can expect to hear and when
• Support and protection from retaliation: Stated explicitly, because adverse action for making a complaint is separately unlawful under the general protections
• Confidentiality, described honestly: Say who will be told and why. Do not promise secrecy you cannot deliver
• Consequences, expressed as a range: Covered in the next section
• Who owns the policy and when it is reviewed: A named role and a date

If you are starting from nothing, a workplace policy and procedure template gives you the structure to adapt rather than a blank page.

Setting Consequences Without Promising a Zero Tolerance Outcome

This is the clause that most often creates the gap described above, and it is fixable with a sentence.

Do not write that bullying will result in dismissal. Write that the organisation will investigate, that outcomes will be proportionate to the seriousness of the conduct and the circumstances, and that they may include counselling, training, a formal warning, a change in duties or reporting line, demotion, or termination of employment.

Three things that wording does. It is accurate, so it will not be used against you.

It gives managers a usable range, so a first moderate incident gets an actual response instead of nothing. And it still ends at dismissal, so nobody reading it thinks the standard is soft.

Add that the organisation will consider the effect on the person who was harmed when deciding an outcome.

It is a small addition and it changes how the process feels to the person who raised it.

Detection: The Zero Tolerance Standard Depends on Noticing

A standard you never apply because nothing reaches you is not zero tolerance, it is silence.

Bullying is under-reported everywhere, and Australian research puts numbers on how far.

In Bully Zero’s 2025 national research only 16% of people who experienced bullying had anyone intervene.

A quarter said their organisation had a policy but did not enforce it, and 23% were not aware of a policy at all.

Separately, Australian survey evidence has found that nearly half of workplace bullying lasts more than six months and around one in six goes on for more than two years.

Behaviour that runs for six months to two years is not invisible. Somebody saw it. The question is what your organisation does with what people notice, which is the subject of building a workplace where people actually speak up.

What to watch for, at an organisational level rather than an individual one:

• Turnover or absence concentrated in one team or under one manager
• Exit interviews that mention a manager without quite making an allegation
• Requests to transfer away from one area
• A team that goes quiet in meetings when a particular person is present
• Complaints that arrive already exhausted, because the person tried informally for months first

Naming the Behaviour, Without Which Zero Tolerance Means Nothing

There is a strong institutional pull toward calling bullying something else. A personality clash. A communication style issue. A difficult team dynamic. Two people who need to work on their relationship.

Those descriptions feel diplomatic and they are usually a mistake, for a specific reason: they convert a one-way pattern into a two-way problem.

Once it is a clash, the person being harmed is half the problem and is expected to contribute half the solution.

That is how organisations end up offering mediation for bullying, which puts the burden on exactly the wrong person.

Naming it accurately does not require you to conclude the allegation is proven.

You can describe what has been alleged in accurate terms while the process runs. What you should not do is relabel it into a category that changes who is responsible.

Acting Promptly, Because Zero Tolerance Cannot Survive Delay

Delay is the most common failure after mislabelling, and it undoes a zero tolerance standard faster than any single decision. It is also expensive in ways that are easy to miss.

• The harm compounds: Psychological injury correlates with duration and with how the organisation responded, not only with the severity of the conduct
• Evidence degrades: Witnesses leave, recollections converge, messages are deleted
• Your position weakens: A delayed response is the fact most likely to defeat a defence that reasonable steps were taken
• Everyone watching learns something: The rest of the team is running an experiment on whether reporting works, and the answer they get determines whether the next person bothers
• The cost spreads outwards: Sustained bullying that nobody addresses shows up as lost productivity, turnover, disengagement and absence, and eventually as reputational damage through review sites, professional networks and word of mouth in a sector where people move between employers

Prompt does not mean rushed. It means acknowledging the report within a day, deciding on immediate safety steps straight away, and setting a realistic timeframe for the rest and then meeting it.

Where a matter needs a formal process, our guide to investigating a complaint of workplace bullying sets out the seven steps, including how to handle allegations that cannot be substantiated.

Enforcement, the Part That Makes Zero Tolerance Real or Hollow

A quarter of Australian workers surveyed said their organisation had a bullying policy that was not enforced.

That is the single most damaging position to be in, worse than having no policy at all, because it establishes that the organisation knows the standard and has decided not to apply it.

Enforcement is where a zero tolerance standard is either proved or exposed, and it is mostly about consistency, which in turn is mostly about the difficult cases.

• Apply it to senior people: Every organisation has at least one person whose behaviour is tolerated because of their output or their relationships. Whether the standard applies to them is the only test of it that anybody in the organisation is actually running
• Apply it consistently across comparable cases: Inconsistent treatment is a live issue in unfair dismissal, and it is what your workforce notices first
• Close the loop with the person who reported: You may not be able to tell them the outcome for the other person. You can always tell them the matter was dealt with, and that alone changes whether they report again
• Record what you did, including for informal resolutions: Matters resolved with a conversation are the ones nobody documents and the ones that prove you acted early

Proving the Zero Tolerance Standard: Acknowledgement, Refresh and Records

A policy nobody has read is not a control, and a zero tolerance standard nobody has acknowledged is not a standard.

For it to do any work, three things have to be true and provable.

• People have received it and acknowledged it, with a record of who and when, including new starters as part of induction
• It is refreshed, annually or every two years, and reissued whenever it materially changes. Psychosocial regulations have changed in every jurisdiction recently, so a policy older than that is likely to be out of date on the law
• Training sits alongside it, because a document tells people the rule and training tells them what it looks like

The reason to hold this centrally rather than in a folder is simple.

When an organisation has to show it took reasonable steps, what it needs is a record: who was trained, who acknowledged the policy, what was reported, what was done and when the controls were last reviewed.

A workplace compliance system keeps that in one place, which matters more than where the policy document itself is stored.

Extending Zero Tolerance Beyond Your Own Employees

Your policy applies to your employees. Your duty, and therefore your zero tolerance standard, does not stop there.

Work health and safety duties extend to contractors, labour hire workers, volunteers, students on placement and other people affected by your work. A zero tolerance standard that has never been communicated to any of them is only half in place.

• Contractors and labour hire: Cover them in the induction, and agree with the labour hire provider who handles a complaint and how information passes between you
• Volunteers and students on placement: Often the least protected people in an organisation, with no employment relationship and the least idea who to tell
• Suppliers and clients: You cannot discipline someone else’s employee, but you control site access, who deals with whom, and whether an engagement continues. Where aggression comes from outside the organisation, our guide to occupational violence and aggression covers the controls that actually work

A Short Zero Tolerance Audit of Your Current Policy

Take your current document and test it against the zero tolerance standard you say you hold. Answer these. Each no is a specific piece of work rather than a general concern.

• Does it define bullying using the repeated, unreasonable, risk to health and safety test, and say intention is not required?
• Does it explain reasonable management action in three parts?
• Does it give examples that include exclusion and withholding information, not only overt conduct?
• Does it say what is not bullying?
• Does it offer a reporting route that bypasses the person’s own manager?
• Does it state timeframes, and does anyone actually meet them?
• Does it express consequences as a proportionate range ending at dismissal, rather than promising a single outcome?
• Does it address retaliation explicitly?
• Does it cover contractors, labour hire, volunteers and placements?
• Can you produce a list of who has acknowledged it, today, without asking anyone?
• Has it been reviewed since the psychosocial regulations changed in your jurisdiction?
• Has it ever been applied to someone senior?

The last question is the one that matters most and the only one that cannot be fixed by editing the document.

Frequently Asked Questions About Zero Tolerance Policies

1. Is a Zero Tolerance Policy for Workplace Bullying a Good Idea?

The instinct is right and the phrase is risky. Zero tolerance for the behaviour, meaning no exceptions for seniority and a response to every report, is sound. Zero tolerance read as an automatic dismissal is a promise your process cannot keep, because a fair process still has to consider the circumstances.

2. Does a Zero Tolerance Policy Mean an Employee Can Be Dismissed Automatically?

No. The Fair Work Commission treats a zero tolerance policy as a starting point rather than a conclusion, and still asks whether the dismissal was harsh, unjust or unreasonable. In one 2022 matter an employee was reinstated despite breaching a zero tolerance alcohol policy, with his length of service weighed against the breach. In another the dismissal was upheld where the breach was extreme and the role safety critical.

3. How Should a Policy Word the Consequences of Bullying?

As a proportionate range rather than a single outcome. State that the organisation will investigate, that outcomes will be proportionate to the seriousness and the circumstances, and that they may include counselling, training, a formal warning, a change in duties or reporting line, demotion or termination. That is accurate, gives managers a usable response for a first moderate incident, and still ends at dismissal.

4. What Must an Australian Workplace Bullying Policy Contain?

A definition matching the statutory test including the point that intention is not required, an explanation of reasonable management action, examples covering quiet conduct such as exclusion, a statement of what is not bullying, who and where it covers, at least one reporting route that bypasses the person’s own manager, what happens after a report and how long it takes, protection from retaliation, honest wording on confidentiality, proportionate consequences, and a named owner with a review date.

5. Why Is an Unenforced Bullying Policy Worse Than No Policy?

Because it establishes that the organisation knew the standard and chose not to apply it. In 2025 Australian research a quarter of people said their workplace had a policy that was not enforced. That teaches the workforce what the standard is actually worth and it is difficult to reconcile with a claim that reasonable steps were taken.

6. Should a Bullying Policy Say What Is Not Bullying?

Yes. Setting out that reasonable management action, a single instance of rudeness, or a decision someone disagrees with are not bullying makes the rest of the policy more credible and gives managers the confidence to keep managing. Without it, policies get used to resist ordinary supervision.

7. Does a Bullying Policy Apply to Contractors and Volunteers?

Your work health and safety duties extend to contractors, labour hire workers, volunteers, students on placement and others affected by your work, so the standard should reach them even though they are not employees. Cover them at induction and agree with any labour hire provider who handles a complaint.

8. How Often Should a Workplace Bullying Policy Be Reviewed?

Annually or every two years, and whenever it materially changes. Psychosocial regulations have changed recently in every Australian jurisdiction, so a policy that has not been reviewed since then is likely to be out of date on the law it relies on.

Read More About Workplace Bullying:

• Workplace bullying and conflict: the line, the law and the duty
• 5 steps to a workplace where people speak up about bullying and harassment
• The duty of a supervisor and manager to eliminate workplace bullying
• 7 steps to investigate a complaint of workplace bullying
• Don’t be a workplace bullying bystander: identify the signs and act