What should I do if I’m being humiliated and bullied by my boss in an employee message group?
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Follow your companies procedure’s for filing a harassment grievance. Then do some work so the truth comes to light and he/she is seen for the asshat they are, etc
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Collect paper trails about that harassment (= print the messages out, to prevent your boss from deleting them) and try to find out how your coworkers (since it was sent in a message group) are reacting to the message(s) in question.
In my long experience with workplace bullies HR doesn’t do shit about upper management harassment and it takes a long time for them to react (because upper management is less replacable in their books than a “normal employee”). If your boss lets his mask slip in front of other “important” workplace members (like maybe HIS superior or another strategically important coworker who doesn’t take bullying lightly) you can let the evidence work for itself 
Ask Andromalius for assistance here; let your boss behave unhinged and nasty in front of important witnesses. It generates sympathy for your cause, a sort of social shielding against further harassment and it would back you up if you decide to go to the HR. If the pressure from other coworkers gets too high, they have to act.
Its the longer way but in my experience the only one if you 1. want to stay at your workplace and 2. expose the target to consequences about their behaviour.
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Also, in my experience, HR will go after the complainant rather than the perpetrator. Its less embarassing for the organisation if they cover up and destroy the whistleblower rather than deal with someone senior doing things they shouldn’t.
So make sure you gather robust evidence- to a point that they are left in no doubt that if they don’t deal with it properly, you have more than enough to put them on the front page of the paper.
I’ve experienced these situations myself and also seen them happen to others many times. In fact my own experiences of it have come from being targeted for stepping up for people who were being targeted and destroyed for reporting severe harassment and bullying by people above them.
Expect dirty play from the other side. Expect them to offer incentives to people you trust to turn on you. Expect anything and everything. So make sure you capture the most robust evidence you can- put them in a position where cover up is impossible without destroying themselves.
Sorry. I’m projecting a bit here. It may be that your organisation actually has ethical HR people and senior management. That does happen sometimes. But gather your evidence thoroughly and leave as little as possible to chance. Sort it easily if you can- but if you have to go to war, then go to war. Sorry, projecting again.
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I’m taking screen shots of the messages in case they do get deleted.
But I think that our district manager is already in the chat. Or someone with HR because if we need to watch a video for the company or anything like that she says something in the group chat about. So I don’t know how she cannot see what’s being said in there.
If she is HR I’m not sure who to go to next.
Also, thanks for everyone’s advice! It’s very helpful.
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Capture screen shots evidencing that these people are also in the chat. Let claims of ignorance on their part be a weak excuse.
I strongly advise gathering all of the information you can open source about the offender and any parties assisting them or being wilfully blind about whats happening.
Simple starting point- collate all information you have about each one and search each piece of that information open source as best you can. Often you can build up a lot of information about someone that way and each piece of information leads to more information. Sometimes, in amongst all of it, there is something that you can put to use in some way.
If they have social media accounts that are not secure, capture information there. Look at the people they actively associate with on social media. Find out what you can about them. Sometimes, associations put the missing puzzle pieces together. You may not know what the puzzle even is, or even if there is a puzzle, but its worth exhausting these avenues.
Consider exploring publicly available databases, such as companies registers, board members of trusts, any others you can think of.
These are just a few examples. Information is everywhere.
If you dig deep enough and extensively enough (even just with information that is in the public space), you can often find avenues into people’s secrets.
I am not suggesting blackmail, that is dangerous and puts you in the position of committing a crime. But causing the secrets of a hostile party to make its way into the hands of others who are hostile to that hostile party, or into the public space, can cut that adversary’s credibility out from under them very quickly.
This is a lot of work. But it can be worth it. Much of my career was spent obtaining and analysing information to piece together jigsaws and generate actionable intelligence from them. I found that as important as having access to large databases of non-publicly available information was, time spent gathering information open source was seldom wasted. Often information in the public space leads to other information in the public space that ultimately leads to critical information.
If your organisation are dicks and go into cover up mode or ignore mode, be prepared for a long conflict and remember this: They do not get to define the parameters of the battlespace. They will try. But you don’t have to be bound by that.
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If it’s an American cooperation there should be a Specific process for going around the boss and Human Resources involved in the district.
For example when lowes originally moved to the district hr model, they then implemented a new procedure for if it was someone whom you should be able to file a grievance with that was causing the harassment.
Like they recognized that the people you should be able to trust are often the ones that cause the problem.
We also had an anonymous hotline. I never could bring myself to use that, figuring it could be traced to my number, but I have skipped the local asshats and gone direct to their higher ups with success.
The problem with this is of course if you have a handpicked lackey, sometimes their next up was the hiring guru, but not always with corporations. Often they prize degree over history and bad history can be covered by leaving it out unless there are legal reports of a previous problem.
I’ve also gone directly to the ceo of companies direct for complaints when the local managers wouldn’t deal, but not as an employee- only as a pissed of consumer with the ability to search up contact information for such persons, So yea to all the above- document it and stuff.
You could also do work to ruin their reputation and increase their bad habits (in hopes they would do it with the wrong people or so many it couldn’t be denied etc)
The easiest rituals for this I can think of for this type of work, are from the same book as my first suggestions- it’s by Corwin Hargrove for Practical Djinn Magick
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Magickally I’d work on the boss himself. A binding to stop him speaking against you, maybe a curse to drive him away or making him lose his job, or sick, or conversely a blessing to get him hired away by an offer he can’t refuse.
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I was thinking a similar thing. The end result would be that he puts a foot wrong in the eyes of someone more important than him.
By any means, a fall out with his boss or some other activity that gets him in trouble that doesn’t include you or your issue but I particularly like Mulberry‘s suggestion of him getting an offer that takes him away.
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Do some curse ritual. You can do mundane things like reporting their harassment to the authorities, etc, but they aren’t always possible. So imho I strongly recommend you curse the f—ing bosses.
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Well, the manager is moving in March. So maybe it will be ok.
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