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Żyglicka · 5 days ago

A new approach to workplace bullying. The new regulations are now in force – are your company’s procedures ready for them?

Reported by Żyglicka. The analysis below is ours.

In force from 5 November 2026

The Warsaw skyline in silhouette across the Vistula at dusk, under a pink sky
Photo: Joshua Kettle on Unsplash

6x

the minimum wage: the floor on compensation an employee can claim for mobbing in Poland

Labour Code Art. 94(3) §11, as amended by the Act of 19 June 2026 (Dz.U. 2026 poz. 1046); PLN 28,836 at the 2026 minimum wage of PLN 4,806

Poland stopped asking whether a bully meant it. Persistent is enough, every employer has to work at prevention, and the least an employee can claim is six months of the minimum wage.

What does Poland's new workplace bullying law say?

Since 5 November 2026, Polish law has a new definition of mobbing, the Polish legal word for workplace bullying, and a new set of obligations around it. The change comes from the Act of 19 June 2026 amending the Labour Code and the Code of Civil Procedure, published in the Journal of Laws on 4 August 2026.

The definition is now short. Mobbing is persistent harassment of an employee, and persistent means repeated, recurring or constant. A one-off incident is not mobbing, even when it infringes somebody's personal rights. The act then lists what it can look like, alone or together: humiliating someone, degrading them, intimidating them, understating their professional worth, unjustified criticism, belittling or ridicule, making it harder to do the job (including cutting someone off from colleagues or from the information they need), and isolating or pushing someone out of the team.

It can be physical, verbal or non-verbal. Ordering or encouraging it counts. It counts even where harassment was not the aim. And it can come from anyone: the employer, a manager, a peer, a subordinate, another employee, or a person working there on some basis other than an employment contract, alone or as a group.

What it costs

An employee who has suffered mobbing may claim compensation of at least six times the minimum wage from the employer, or claim damages. At the 2026 minimum wage of PLN 4,806 that floor is PLN 28,836. An employer who pays out may then recover from the person responsible, in proportion to that person's fault and its own.

Why the old definition was so hard to prove

The old Labour Code asked for harassment or intimidation that was persistent and long-term, and that lowered the employee's sense of their own professional worth or caused, or was aimed at, humiliation, ridicule or isolation. Compensation for the harm itself was tied to a health disorder the mobbing had caused.

Read that as somebody who has spent a year being frozen out of meetings. They had to show it went on long enough, show what it did to them or what it was meant to do, and, for compensation, show a medical consequence. Each of those is a place a claim could fail while everybody in the room knew what had happened.

The new text removes "long-term", drops the requirement that the behaviour had a particular purpose or effect, and no longer ties compensation to health. What is left is the pattern itself. That shifts the question a manager will be asked from "did they mean it?" to "did it keep happening, and what did you do?"

What "systematic" prevention means

The first paragraph of the new Article 94(3) applies to every employer, whatever its size. It says an employer must counteract mobbing systematically, in particular through prevention, detection, a proper response, corrective action and support for the people affected. Five verbs, and only one of them is about responding to a complaint.

Employers with at least ten employees go further. They must set out the rules, procedures and frequency of their actions on dignity, equal treatment, discrimination and mobbing in a regulation, unless those are already in a collective agreement or the work rules. The text is agreed with the workplace trade union or unions, or with employee representatives where there is no union. If there is no agreement within 30 days of the draft, the employer sets it, taking account of what was agreed along the way. Employers have six months from 5 November 2026 to adapt their work rules or issue the regulation.

"Frequency" is the word to notice. A policy read once at induction is a document. A rhythm is something a team can see.

Where feedback ends and mobbing begins

The act draws the line itself: justified conduct, expressed in a proper form, is not mobbing, in particular holding someone to account for their work or criticising it. The same list that names "unjustified criticism" protects the justified kind.

So the test is not whether a conversation was uncomfortable. It is whether the criticism was about the work, whether it was fair, and whether the form fitted. A manager who says "this report missed two deadlines, here is what I need" is inside the line. A manager who says it in front of the team every Monday, about one person, is testing it.

For the habit that keeps feedback on the right side, see how to give feedback.

Questions managers ask

Does the law cover a small company?

The obligation to counteract mobbing systematically has no headcount threshold, so it applies to every employer. The written regulation, agreed with unions or employee representatives, applies from ten employees.

Does it reach behaviour that started before November?

Yes, where it continued after. The act applies the new rules to persistent harassment that began before 5 November 2026 and carried on after that date.

We are a UK company with a team in Poland. Does this concern us?

If people are employed under Polish law, their employer is the one the Labour Code speaks to. This card is not legal advice: take local advice on what your contracts and your work rules need before May.

What a manager should do this week

Picture Kasia, who leads eight people in a Kraków office. One of them has stopped being copied into the weekly planning thread, and nobody can remember deciding that. It is not dramatic. It is exactly item six on the act's list.

  • Find out where a complaint goes. If you do not know who investigates and how quickly, ask before somebody needs it.
  • Look for the quiet pattern. Who is left off invitations, whose work is criticised in public, who stopped speaking in meetings.
  • Keep criticism about the work. Specific, private where possible, and the same standard for everyone.
  • Write down what you see, with dates. "Persistent" is a question about a pattern, and a pattern is easier to address when someone noticed it early.

For how a regulator elsewhere turned conduct into something firms report, see the FCA's non-financial misconduct rules.

What MeaningFuel does about it

Before it happensWhat the daily ritual works on, every working day
Respect, Feedback and Accountability become a question somebody answers on a Tuesday morning rather than a paragraph in a regulation, on every working day rather than once at induction. A rhythm of prevention is easier to show when one has been running.
After it hasThe module prescribed to the team that has this
Book Civility and Respect for the team where something is actually happening: ten short daily lessons over two working weeks on the slights and put-downs that escalate, and on what a colleague can do when they see one, with two ten-minute debriefs its lead runs. Each person chooses whether to take part, and the lead sees that the team is doing it, never anyone's answers.
What management seesThe reading that makes either one provable
Engagement by team and by theme, plus training hours per employee in the shape GRI 404-1 and ESRS S1-13 ask for. What anybody chose waits until enough have answered to hide each choice, and no screen shows an individual's.

The offsite worked. That was never the problem.

Week six is the problem. The person who ran it has moved teams, the thing everyone agreed has quietly stopped happening, and nobody can name the day it stopped. A poster on the wall or a values page on your website never asks anyone a question.

MeaningFuel keeps it going: one short insight each working day on the values you chose, and a two-week micro-training for any team that falls behind. You see which teams carry them, pooled, with nobody named.

Start 14 days freeNot convinced? Read the long version

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