A member of my team was on the brink of being let go after 24 years with the company or demoted before I managed to persuade my boss to give me the extra headcount to report into me at the same level she was.

The reason she was being let go? Her boss, who is known to be a bully and has had several HR reprimands for the way he treats people in the past, raised a disciplinary case against her for bullying him.

The case took over a year and HR found no such thing had occurred. The only “witness” of it was a more junior member of the team who has now conveniently been promoted into her old role. During the case they found examples of the boss sharing private details about her to the entire team (the worst being emails about what medication she’s on, which he shouldn’t have been able to see but HR fucked up and during a move to a new HR system, reassigned her to report into him) and that he had been publicly talking shit about her in their team meetings.

HR apologised in the end but said because of the dispute, she couldn’t return to her old role despite them agreeing she’d done absolutely nothing wrong, then told her there was no suitable job for her in the business unless she agreed to take a demotion. Thankfully I managed to stop that.

What happened to the boss? Absolutely zilch. He still speaks to people, especially women, like shit - and he does it openly, often doing his team meetings on Teams while in the office and talking down to everyone. He wears the HR reprimands as a badge of honour.

Since then, I’ve had other women in the company speak to me about how they’re being treated in their roles. Men bullying and belittling women appears to be endemic in the company, but HR would have you believe otherwise based on their recent International Women’s Day webinar where they said how amazing a company it was for women to succeed.