One of the problems an organisation faces is actually defining bullying in the first place. Obviously there will be clear examples but an organisation can also be faced with a clash of personalities or styles that simply just don't work (together). This often arises on a background of some disgruntled employees' willingness to raise the spectre of bullying whenever it suits a cause.

I make the point to simply confirm the complexity of the issue from an employer's perspective.

Why is it that the behavior of our politicians of the two major parties is not seen for what it is. Bully-boy tactics. When this is being played out nightly on our TV screens is it any wonder that it translates not just into the workplace but into the educational system as well.
I find it ironic that those who use bullying as a political tool are now going to hold an investigation into it - but not in their own backyard of course.
It may be a function of my age and my upbringing but a return to public consideration for the views of even those we oppose may work for the betterment of the whole community.

I'd say what we need to do to tackle workplace bullying is actually start looking at bullying as a cultural phenomenon. It starts young. Kids start bullying each other in school, and often the most successful bullies aren't the ones who are doing it to improve their self esteem. Instead, the most successful bullies are the ones who are bullying to maintain their position in or near the top of a social hierarchy. A successful bully will keep bullying for as long as bullying remains a successful tactic - as an example, I offer up Mitt Romney, of the US Republican party, who has been revealed to have been a bully in high school. In a culture which rewards bullying (see Terry Goulden's comment above about our political leaders) there is no incentive for bullies to stop using these very successful tactics, and in a culture where being bullied is seen as a sign of shame, there is definitely no incentive for victims of bullying to speak out.

As a former bullying target myself (twelve years of bullying in school, and at least one further experience of workplace bullying) I can testify that after a while you get used to it. There's a term for it in psychological literature: learned helplessness. You're in a terrible situation, nothing you're doing appears to alter the situation, eventually you learn to stop trying and just endure. You get used to being the target, and you get used to having yourself degraded at every step. Indeed, you can get so used to it that its absence comes as a shock (I wound up having a breakdown during my second year of university study because I'd spent the previous eighteen months on tenterhooks waiting for the bullying to start - it was the first time in my life I'd experienced education without "friendly teasing" from my peers for the crime of existing and being good at academics).

I suspect in order for workplace bullying to cease, we're going to have to alter our values as a culture. We're going to have to start saying early and often that bullying tactics (let's define bullying as intimidating people in order to get your own way, either physically or verbally) are not acceptable. In primary school years, we have to make it clear to kids that this isn't considered polite or nice. By adolescent years (high school age) it has to be made clear to them that physical bullying is assault, and that verbal bullying can be classed as either libel or slander - all of which are criminal offences. We have to change things so that being a victim of bullying is not a stigma for the victim - and the victims need to know that action can and will be taken. We have to get rid of the whole "don't dob" ethos, and be willing to speak up about the abuses we see in our midst. And we have to do this over the long term, because bullying won't go away completely in the first rush of enforcement - instead the bullies will lie low, and resurface when they think we aren't watching as hard, to re-use these tactics of intimidation and denigration they've found work so very well to get their own way. They're going to keep trying to use these tactics for the rest of their lives, and they'll pass those tactics on to their kids, so we're going to have to keep watching for at least two or three generations (I'd say seven).

Getting rid of bullying is going to need cultural change, and I suspect even if all of the rest of us are willing to make that change, the large bullying institutions at the top of the tree are going to be resisting it with everything they've got.

I think too that issues of bullying as such need to be distinguished from broad class conflict in the workplace, and in that the simple ongoing reality that middle management remains the peanut butter in the proverbial sandwich.

I appear one of very few in this country who actually worked at a trade for many years, worked in supervision and apprentice training, before being given a collar and tie job in the workshop office finally, after which I eventually entered university initially to study Psychology, Industrial Relations, Economics and Anthropology. In the end I did Anthropology, and later Literature and English, and currently Criminal Justice.

It remains a constant challenge, even today, to reconcile all the different points of view, to articulate all the different points of tension and conflict in such a diverse mix as the Australian working environment. I have to say that those who come up through the union and Labor ranks as distinct from completing and working at a recognised trade, or actually worked in supervision and management, and worse those who made their way exclusively through the education tunnel with no real workplace or shop floor experience whatsoever, are the persistently most difficult to deal with.

I argue that's because they deal with everything ideologically, in abstraction, rather than on the basis of real hands-on training and experience. Trying raising a simple issue at a union meeting, for example, and watch everyone run for cover, watch the acrimony and abuse, and the orchestrated 'decisions' made on that basis.

There is far too much being touted as bullying which is in fact class conflict. There is far too much touted as bullying which is in fact skill, educational and motivational difference. There is far too much touted as bullying which is in fact legitimate direction to obstinate employees who have no more right to be there than anybody in the whole company.

Managing and supervising workers on any shop floor, in any workplace, is the single most arduous, stress-filled assignment of any in Australia. Many unionists persistently fail to help ammeliorate the situation by refusing to consider the common interest of the business as a whole, the point of their being there to start with. Many managers fail to help the situation because they fail to grasp the human factor alongside the technical and administrative, and I suggest should never have been promoted anyway.

The task in this country would challenge Solomon.

Again, greater emphasis on what everyone in a given workplace has in common, and in that all they are really doing is trying to make a living, nothing more or less than that, would help a great deal. No industrial or workplace legislation is ever going to persuade the irritable and intractible to settle down and do the right thing, you have to roll your sleaves up, get in there, and show them by example how to do it better.

Henry Ford once said, "It's not the company who pays the wages, it's the customer who pays the wages. All the company does is handle the money."

I mean, what is there to bicker and argue over so constantly? If you don't like the way the company is being run, get yourself promoted and show everyone how to do it. I know it can be done because I've done it. All that sort of achievement does is bring respect.

This exact same scenario is what I have been working on in my research on bullying. I have read 40 books or more on bullying, including the best one, "Bully in Sight by Tim Fields (of the United Kingdom). None really offer an answer, except to point out that who ever bullies usually has low self esteem. Those of us Targeted usually posses skills and talent that the bully wants and is jealous of.
I have asked my "bullies" "why are you so mean?"
It causes them to think of their actions.
I think the answer lies in teaching children about acceptance and tolerance of all people. If I run up against someone who is attempting to "push my buttons" on purpose, which is the start of finding out whom can be bullied, I call them out on their behavior. I use a low soft voice to point out I what I want and expect from them. I usually tell them that I expect to be respected, even if it means that they don't talk to me, unless it can be in a respectful tone and manner. Thank goodness, there are experts out there that are working on this, and education on both sides, the ones doing the bullying and the Targets out there taking the 'abuse' lessons can be learned.

I'm not sure that the answer to bullying doesn't lie in education. Not in trying to persuade kids not to bully, but in teaching kids how not to be bullied. Small, quiet, already preferring to read a book than do anything else, I was the bottom of the pecking order, and got thumped by everyone who couldn't thump anybody else.

I simply fell over and cried. That was until the day I was accused of biting some kid. Then in front of the whole school I got 'the strap'. My sister came home and told Mum that I had 'got the strap'. I denied it, Mum rang the head mistress and I got a 'hiding' for telling lies.

Somebody was going to pay!

I never said anything, but somehow they guessed and protected the kid, who was taken to another school at the end of the week. From that day onward, bully me if you dared, and maybe I did get a 'hiding', -- often enough -- but know that I was coming back for you, again and again, until I won.

Two years later, now in the 'big school', across the road, few picked on me, and I fairly regularly stepped in when other kids were being bullied.

I was still small, still quiet, but very much left alone and it has continued on throughout my life.

Kids need to be taught, compelled to fight back. You do not need to win, you just need to demonstrate that it is not worth the effort of picking on you.

The side benefit is that 'insults' and 'taunts' somehow fail to effect you. It is much the same as anyone who can really fight, can and does walk away from idiots attempting to pick a fight. They just cease to matter, to be worth noticing.

No-one expects to be bullied at the workplace; we all live in hope that "it won't happen to me". However, given the apparent increase in bullying, it more than likely will happen at some point or another. I thought I was "bully proof" but realised that I was out of my depth after an analysis of general workplace relations convinced me that bullying was the dominant mode of managers managing and ground staff relating to each other. Deciding that no "fix" was available, especially because my PSA organiser was conducting himself like the provisional wing of the HR department, and being too old and too tough to find "flight" acceptable, I set upon a strategy of making the bullies life difficult.

Here are some tips:

i) accept that you won't win;
ii) aim for a payout or forced redundancy;
iii) keep immaculate records.

No great triumph but at least I forced my NSW public service department to suspend me on full pay for ten months while they employed an ex-deputy Commissioner of Police (NSW) to "investigate" allegations made against me prior to settling a lump sum to make me go away. For a while there I had the perfect post industrial work life - I didn't want to go to work, they didn't want me there and they paid me to stay away.

Above all realise that when bullies swing into action there are no rules. None. There is no lie so great they will not spread it, no slander too outrageous that it will not be made, no criminal act (yes) so serious they will hold back from committing it.

In short, when you're being bullied, forget justice and go for the money. It is the only dignified way out. Play every card you've got to increase the payout because this is what mangers and heads o' dept understand.