HCML

As part of its growing employment services offering, Health & Case Management Ltd (HCML) is launching its anti-bullying product to help companies manage and prevent bullying at work.

On 7 November 2007, coinciding with "Ban Bullying at Work", a report by Royal & Sun Alliance said that bullying increasingly led people to take time off work, estimating that the related financial loss already runs into billions of pounds with around 80 million lost working days lost each year due to bullying.

Said Karen Hunt, Employment Services Manager at HCML:

Workplace bullying is a very real problem throughout the UK and eliminating it just makes good business sense. The costs related to bullying are huge, affecting sickness absence, staff turnover, reduced productivity for victim and colleagues, costs of investigation, litigation and general industrial unrest.

The benefits of proactively managing workplace bullying are huge in terms of increased employee satisfaction and a rise in productivity.

Said Fletcher Trowse, rehabilitation case manager vocational lead at HCML:

"Our figures show that bullying accounts for 50% of occurrences of work?related stress. Although 83% of UK employers have a policy on bullying/harassment, only 25% of employers train managers to counsel victims of bullying and 13% provide training to counsel bullies.

Our new offering will assist organisations create and implement company specific policies on bullying. We will also train managers to deal with bullying using a range of tools such as mediation.

Said Helen Merfield, CEO of HCML:

Our core business has always been the provision of rehabilitation case management services and this is a natural extension of our increasingly comprehensive employment services offering. We have already assisted many individuals who were off work as a result of workplace bullying by facilitating and negotiating their safe and sustainable gradual return to work.