If your employer does nothing about colleague harassment, that silence can cost them

The situation

An employee brought a claim against a local authority employer after colleagues at work treated them in a way that disrupted their ability to do the job. The tribunal found that the employer had taken few or no meaningful steps to support the employee against this treatment. The case turned on a narrower but important question: once an employer is shown to have done little or nothing, who has to prove what "reasonable" action would have looked like?

What the tribunal found

The Employment Appeal Tribunal held that your contract of employment carries an implied termA term that forms part of your employment contract even though it is not written down. The duty of mutual trust and confidence is the most important implied term, but others include the duty to pay wa...: your employer must take reasonable steps to support you so you can do your job without harassment or disruption from colleagues. The tribunal went further on how that principle works in practice. Once it is shown that an employer took no step, or no significant step, to meet that obligation, it is the employer who must prove that no reasonable step was actually available to them. It is not down to you to set out exactly what your employer should have done differently.

Say you have flagged bad treatment from colleagues, harassment, being frozen out, disruption that will not stop, and your employer barely responded. This case speaks directly to your situation. The law does not expect you to draft your employer's action plan for them. Once you can show they took no meaningful steps, the burden shifts. It becomes their job to explain what they considered, what they tried, and why nothing more was reasonably possible.

In practice, this means keeping a record of when you raised the issue, who you told, and what happened next, or did not happen next. If your employer's file shows no evidence of steps taken, that gap works against them, not you. Employers often claim they did what they could. This principle stops that claim from working unless they can actually back it up.

This case is old and the facts behind it are not fully documented in the sources available to us. But the principle it set has stood the test of time and has been relied on in later, better known cases, including a House of Lords case about a police officer let down after reporting an assault by a colleague. If colleagues are still treating you badly and your employer still is not acting, do not wait to see if it settles down on its own. Get advice now.