What are negative behaviours?
Negative behaviours include several communication and behaviour issues such as passive aggressiveness, narcissism, or disrespect towards other staff members. These behaviours can be indicators of bullying or can mask other serious integrity-related issues such as fraud and corruption.
Some of the most common types of negative behaviours are:
- Favourtism, exclusion, and isolation of staff
- Lateness
- Resistance to working with others
- Unreasonable management actions
- Not responding well to constructive criticism.
Negative Behaviours are also any actions or statements including social media posts that bring the organisation into public disrepute, contempt, scandal, or ridicule, or that reflect unfavourably on the organisation and its reputation.
What are the effects of negative behaviours on your organisation?
The effects of negative behaviours on your other employees can be significant and vary from physical impacts, like health-related issues, to emotional concerns such as depression and anxiety, to organisational issues such as low job satisfaction and high staff turnover.
At an organisational level, bad behaviour can have a tangible impact on profitability, missed objectives, and declining productivity ultimately resulting in diminished profitability and/or productivity.
Along with consequences for productivity and project delivery, negative behaviours by staff can be masking an even greater problem such as collusion, or fraud.
Failing to provide a mechanism that allows employees to lodge an anonymous complaint can have a negative ongoing impact and risks further potential consequences for the organisation.
How to manage negative behaviours in your organisation
A Whistleblower and complaints management service that your employees trust to report negative behaviours related to bullying, sexual harassment, policy breach, corruption, fraud, and other related issues, means that an organisation can quickly and fairly address and resolve the problem.
Unaddressed complaints will not self-resolve. They will escalate and become more problematic for an organisation.
Your next step is to identify an effective external Whistleblower and Complaints Management Mechanism, that will provide a platform that your staff can trust, to lodge a complaint. That their complaint will be dealt with impartially and that the staff member will feel that their anonymity can be protected.
A high-quality external whistleblower and complaints management service should deliver the following benefits:
- Confidentiality, impartiality, and anonymity are ensured
- 24-hour online reporting, email, and telephone call service
- Investigators and call takers with expertise in obtaining quality information from callers (no call centre)
- Access controls
- Secure data management with all data retained in Australia
- De-identified reporting capability.
At PKF, we specialise in managing whistleblower and other types of conduct complaints with the added benefit of an independent whistleblower and conduct complaints management system. If you would like to know more about what we do and how we do it, please see our services here.
