Bullying is the most common form of workplace harassment according to the Anti-Defamation League.
For Michael Riordan it wasn’t always easy to live her truth.
“I am a 42-year-old transgender woman,” she said. “I came out when I was 37.”
That’s when she got involved with Compass, a LGBTQ community center in Palm Beach County.
“We do what’s called a cultural competency training and we’ll go out to businesses and organizations and we will give them a 101 course on LGBT issues, on trans people,” Riordon said.
She says the pandemic caused training to go virtual, opening the door for cyber-bullying.
“And in Zoom in this new world that we are living in where people can kind of hide their faces there was one person really kind of coming after me in the chat, hard,” Riordon said. “I was really surprised by it.”
According the the Anti-Defamation League minorities reported a 35 percent increase in online bullying.
“Psychological power abuse can be done over Zoom, over Slack,” she said. “There’s a lot ways people can do things and people are experiencing that right now.”
LeBaron Meyers is the President of #NotMe Solutions an app designed to make it easier to report workplace misconduct.
“Employees don’t trust their employers right now,” Meyers said. “So, they are not speaking up on their platform. So, we created Not Me so that anyone anywhere could speak up.”
She says during the pandemic they’ve seen a 29 percent increase in reporting.
“Everyone has different boundaries that feel right, that feel safe,” Meyers said.
“Hopefully, we can get to a part where we can listen to each other and learn from each other,” Riordan said.
