Personal Harassment At Work: What It Is And Where The Law Reaches

What Personal Harassment Is, and What It Is Not

Personal harassment at work is unwanted conduct directed at a worker as an individual.

Not because of their race, sex, disability, age, religion or any other protected attribute, but because of who they are, what they did, or simply because someone decided to target them.

It is the residual category. When harassment does not attach to a protected attribute, is not physical, and is not being done by someone with authority over the target, personal harassment is what is left.

The term has no standing in Australian legislation. No Act uses it, and a worker who walks into the Fair Work Commission asking to make a personal harassment claim will have the matter dealt with as something else.

That does not make it a useless idea, because it describes a real pattern that organisations recognise instantly. It does mean you need to know what the law calls it before you can do anything about it.

Personal Harassment or Discriminatory Harassment: The Distinction That Decides the Route

This is the single most important thing on this page, and it is the point most guidance gets wrong.

Harassment based on a personal characteristic such as race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, disability or age is discriminatory harassment.

It has its own body of law: the four federal discrimination Acts, the Fair Work general protections, and state and territory anti-discrimination law.

A worker can take it to the Australian Human Rights Commission or their state body.

Personal harassment is what remains once the attribute is taken out. Same conduct, no protected characteristic, and a very different set of options.

Read the last row before the others. Your obligation to control the risk does not change based on which category the conduct falls into. Only the worker’s options change.

If the conduct in front of you does involve a protected attribute, our guide to discriminatory harassment is the one you want, and it covers the attribute-based version of everything below, including exclusion from development opportunities and being passed over for promotion because of a personal characteristic.

What Personal Harassment Looks Like at Work

Social and Relational Conduct

• Freezing someone out of conversations, lunches, chat channels and team social events
• Coordinated silence, or a team agreeing without saying so to stop including one person
• Spreading rumours, gossip or private information about a colleague
• Persistent mockery of someone’s manner, voice, habits or interests

Work-Related Conduct

• Withholding information, access or handover that someone needs to do their job
• Consistently allocating the least interesting or least visible work to one person
• Excluding one worker from training, development or stretch opportunities
• Taking credit for their work, or attributing failures to them
• Sabotage: moving deadlines, losing paperwork, quietly undoing work

Online Conduct

• Pile-ons in group chats, or a private channel that exists to talk about one person
• Screenshots circulated to embarrass someone
• Deliberate exclusion from meeting invitations and message threads

The Subtlety Problem

Personal harassment is frequently not overt. Every item above is deniable on its own and several are indistinguishable from ordinary workplace friction if you look at a single instance. The harm is the pattern, and the pattern is only visible if someone is looking across weeks rather than at one incident.

Why Personal Harassment Is the Hardest Kind to Act On

• No attribute means no obvious law: Workers who look up their rights find discrimination law, discover it does not apply to them, and conclude they have none.
• It is deniable by design: Exclusion leaves no evidence. Nobody can produce the meeting they were not invited to.
• It is often collective: Where a group is involved, there is no single respondent to put allegations to.
• The reframe is always available: Personality clash, culture fit, they are sensitive, it is just how the team is.
• Policies do not name it: A behaviour policy built around protected attributes has no shelf for personal harassment, so complaints have nowhere to be filed.

The Three Legal Routes for Personal Harassment, and Which Ones Close

1. Anti-Discrimination Law: Closed

The federal discrimination Acts and their state equivalents all require a protected attribute. Where personal harassment involves none, there is no claim and no Human Rights Commission route. This is the door workers most often try first and it is the one that will not open.

2. The Fair Work Act: Open, If the Conduct Is Repeated

Workplace bullying under section 789FD is defined as an individual or group repeatedly behaving unreasonably towards a worker or group of workers at work, where the behaviour creates a risk to health and safety.

Personal harassment fits that definition comfortably, provided it happened more than once.

Two limits matter. Reasonable management action carried out in a reasonable manner is excluded, and three things must all be true for that exclusion to apply: the conduct is genuinely management action, the action is reasonable, and the manner of carrying it out is reasonable.

And the Commission cannot award compensation on a stop bullying application. It can make orders it considers appropriate to prevent the worker being bullied, and it will not make one where there is no ongoing risk.

The general protections are also available where the personal harassment followed the exercise of a workplace right, such as making a complaint or taking leave. That is a common trigger and it is worth checking for.

3. Work Health and Safety Law: Open, and Usually the One That Matters

Safe Work Australia names bullying, harassment, discrimination, aggression and violence among the psychosocial hazards a person conducting a business or undertaking must manage.

The duty is to eliminate or minimise the risk so far as is reasonably practicable.

There is a second hazard category that matters even more here.

Conflict or poor workplace relationships and interactions is named separately from bullying and harassment, and it covers the breakdown of individual and team relationships, animosity, social conflict and incivility.

Regulator guidance is explicit that conflict becomes a stressor where it remains unresolved or becomes intense, and that employers must take proactive steps to prevent or minimise it as early as possible.

Personal harassment that nobody will label as bullying still lands squarely inside that category.

Nothing in either duty depends on a protected attribute, and nothing in them requires repetition.

For personal harassment it is frequently the only route with real force behind it, and it is the reason an employer cannot treat a complaint that fits no discrimination category as a complaint that needs no action.

Our guide to psychosocial risk management sets out how to run it as a registered hazard.

Personal Harassment That Happens Only Once

This is the gap worth understanding properly, because it catches organisations out.

A single serious incident of personal harassment, with no protected attribute attached and no repetition, has no anti-discrimination route and no Fair Work stop bullying route.

On the two avenues workers know about, it falls through.

What it does not fall through is your work health and safety duty, which is engaged by the risk rather than by the frequency.

So the practical position is this: the worker may have limited external options, and you have exactly the same obligation you would have had if it were repeated.

Organisations that read the absence of a claim as the absence of a problem tend to discover the difference later, when the conduct has become repeated and the record shows they knew about the first incident and did nothing.

Personal Harassment and the Claims Data: What Harassment Costs

Safe Work Australia, Key Work Health and Safety Statistics Australia 2025, 2023-24 preliminary data.

Harassment and bullying cause more mental stress claims in Australia than work pressure does. Workers compensation does not sort those claims by whether a protected attribute was involved, and neither does the harm.

Where Employers Get Personal Harassment Wrong

• Treating the policy as an anti-discrimination policy: If every example in it involves a protected attribute, personal harassment has no home and no name.
• Reading no claim as no problem: The narrower legal route does not narrow your duty.
• Calling it a personality clash before investigating: That is a conclusion, not a starting position.
• Looking at incidents instead of patterns: Personal harassment is invisible one incident at a time and obvious across a quarter.
• Having no way to handle a group respondent: Most processes assume one person did one thing.
• Missing the retaliation trigger: Where personal harassment began after someone complained or took leave, the general protections may apply and the exposure is much larger.

How to Prevent Personal Harassment

1. Name It in the Policy, Separately From Discrimination

Give personal harassment its own definition and its own examples, including exclusion, rumour, withholding information and online pile-ons. A worker needs to see their situation described before they will report it.

2. Build a Culture of Respect and Inclusion, and Be Specific About It

Inclusion language is easy to write and hard to operationalise. The version that works is behavioural: who gets invited, who gets the handover, who gets the interesting work, who gets spoken over. Create genuine opportunities for people from different teams and backgrounds to work together, because familiarity is what makes exclusion harder to sustain.

3. Train Everyone, and Train Managers on Patterns

Workers need to recognise personal harassment and know it is reportable even without a protected attribute. Managers need to know how to look across time rather than at one incident. Sentrient’s workplace bullying course and the version for managers and supervisors cover both levels, with respect at work training underneath.

4. Put It on the Psychosocial Risk Register

Registering harassment as a hazard with controls, an owner and a review date is what converts it from a matter that surfaces on complaint into one you actively manage.

5. Protect People Who Speak Up

State plainly that retaliation will not be tolerated, and check after every complaint. Retaliation is both the most common escalation and, where a workplace right was exercised, a separate legal exposure.

6. Read Your Own Data by Team

Turnover, absence, leave patterns and engagement comments concentrated around one team or one person tell you what a complaints register will not.

How to Respond to a Personal Harassment Complaint

1. Take it as seriously as any other complaint: The absence of a protected attribute changes the worker’s legal options, not the seriousness of the conduct.
2. Ask for the pattern, not just the incident: Dates, examples, who was present, what changed and when it started. One instance rarely tells you anything.
3. Check what preceded it: If the conduct began after a complaint, a claim or a period of leave, you may be looking at a general protections matter rather than an interpersonal one.
4. Do not classify it as a personality clash before you have looked: Test whether the conduct runs both ways and whether it is proportionate.
5. Investigate impartially, with someone who has no stake, allegations put to each respondent, and a decision on the balance of probabilities. Where a group is involved, deal with each person individually rather than addressing the team collectively.
6. Move the respondent, not the complainant, if separation is needed.
7. Take proportionate action and support the person harassed: Employee Assistance Program access, time, and a check-in after the process closes rather than only during it.
8. Fix the conditions: If the team’s norms allowed it, discipline of one person will not change them.

Workers who want to go further can apply to the Fair Work Commission for a stop bullying order where the conduct is repeated, raise a general protections matter where a workplace right was involved, or contact their work health and safety regulator.

Time limits apply, so advice from a union, a community legal centre or a lawyer is worth getting early.

A Personal Harassment Prevention Checklist

• Your behaviour policy defines personal harassment separately from discrimination
• The examples include exclusion, rumour, withholding information and online conduct
• The policy says conduct is reportable whether or not a protected attribute is involved
• There is a reporting path that does not run through the line manager
• Your process can handle a complaint with more than one respondent
• Managers are trained to look at patterns across time, not single incidents
• Harassment sits on your psychosocial risk register with controls and an owner
• Retaliation protections are written down and checked after every complaint
• You review turnover, absence and engagement data by team at least quarterly
• All workers have completed bullying or respect at work training and you hold the records
• A single serious incident triggers a response, not a wait to see if it repeats

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What Is Personal Harassment in the Workplace?

Personal harassment is unwanted conduct directed at a worker as an individual rather than because of a protected attribute such as race, sex, disability or age. It includes exclusion, rumour, withholding information, mockery and sabotage.

2. Is Personal Harassment Illegal in Australia?

No Australian Act uses the term, but the conduct is covered. Where it is repeated and creates a risk to health and safety it is workplace bullying under the Fair Work Act. It also engages the work health and safety duty to manage psychosocial risk, and the general protections where it followed the exercise of a workplace right.

3. What Is the Difference Between Personal Harassment and Discriminatory Harassment?

Discriminatory harassment targets a protected attribute and opens the anti-discrimination route through the Australian Human Rights Commission or a state body. Personal harassment targets the individual with no attribute involved, which closes that route. The employer’s duty to control the risk is identical either way.

4. Can I Make a Complaint If There Is No Discrimination Involved?

Yes. Internally, any harassment should be reportable regardless of attribute. Externally, the Fair Work Commission can make a stop bullying order where the conduct is repeated, and your work health and safety regulator has jurisdiction over psychosocial risk that is not being managed.

5. Does Personal Harassment Have to Be Repeated?

For a Fair Work stop bullying order, yes. For your employer’s work health and safety duty, no. A single serious incident engages the duty to manage the risk even though it does not support a stop bullying application.

6. Is Exclusion From a Team Really Harassment?

It can be. Deliberate, sustained exclusion from conversations, information, meetings and opportunities is one of the most common forms of personal harassment, and it is repeated unreasonable behaviour capable of creating a risk to health and safety.

7. Is It Just a Personality Clash?

Sometimes, but that is a finding rather than a starting assumption. Genuine clashes tend to run in both directions and stay proportionate. Personal harassment runs one way and escalates.

8. Can a Group Be Responsible for Personal Harassment?

Yes. The Fair Work definition covers an individual or a group behaving unreasonably. Where several people are involved, put the allegations to each of them individually rather than addressing the team as a whole.

Where to Start

Open your behaviour policy and look for an example of harassment that does not involve a protected attribute.

If every example is attribute-based, a worker being frozen out by their team has nothing in your policy that describes what is happening to them.

Then ask how a complaint naming four people would move through your process. Most processes assume one respondent, and personal harassment often does not have one.

Read More About Workplace Harassment:

• The 12 most common types of workplace harassment in Australia
• How to identify, prevent and respond to discriminatory harassment in the workplace
• How to identify, prevent and respond to psychological harassment in the workplace
• How to identify, prevent and respond to power harassment in the workplace
• What is bullying and what is conflict in the workplace
• Psychosocial risk management: treating mental health risks like any other workplace risk