 Well, hi, everybody, and welcome back to the Think Tech Hawaii studios for another exciting episode of Security Matters. I'm your host, Andrew Lanning. Stay with me. It's Dawn Marie Westmoreland. I'm so happy to have her on. We've been trying to get another subject matter expert in here to talk about this bullying in the workplace. Bullying seems to be everywhere these days. But, Dawn, I really appreciate you taking some time. I know you have your own show and you're very busy. So, thank you so much for joining us today. Oh, what a pleasure. On a rainy day here in Asheville, North Carolina, what a pleasure, Andrew. Oh, good. I'm glad we got you indoors to keep you dry. Well, you know, we've got to know your, you talk a lot about the safe and respectful workplaces. And I want to sort of deconstruct that a little bit. So, I think safety, you know, if we just talk about that, you know, we start off at an early age, you know, we go to school and now we're having a lot of school violence. So, you know, when we send people places, they expect that place to be safe. And in a workplace, you know, obviously it's incumbent upon employers also to provide a workplace. And employees that don't feel safe obviously aren't going to be productive. So, talk a little bit about some of that history. And actually, you know what, I forgot, I believe something here. Let's go back and get some of your history for our audience. I know you have a big audience, but my audience may not know your work. So, let me give you a chance to build in there and brag a little bit about how you, how you've arrived to where you're at today. Okay. Well, I'll give you the very, very short version. I've been retired from the Air Force 15 years on Valentine's Day, this past Valentine's Day. Oh, wow. And then I worked in the Veteran Affairs for five years and my background is in human resources and I'm giving off my age. I've been in HR for about 29 years. And while working for the Veteran Affairs, one of the first things that I noticed, and I'm in Ashville, North Carolina, there's a revenue part of the VA. And I noticed nepotism, hiring a family and friends, which is illegal in the government by management. And I also noticed, you know, I'm white or Caucasian and I noticed there's about 500 white folks and five black folks and I'm thinking, wait a minute, I know what's going on. That's illegal too. Well, fast forwarded, I spoke up, went to many government agencies and I got retaliation pretty severe. And, you know, I ended up losing my home, my livelihood, my paycheck was cut off, I was stalked, my phone was tapped. I mean, you know, whistleblowers can really get beat up really badly. But I think my Air Force career, my faith, you know, moved me forward. You know, I would say my aha moment was when I had three days in the Ashville Charles George VA hospital because things had gotten to, you know, bottomed out. You know, I was starting to feel unsafe. My tires, you know, had been flattened. I mean, it's just one thing after another. And so that's when I had the aha moment that, hey, I don't have to be a victim. Hey, you know, I'm a female that went through 20 years in the Air Force with a bunch of men. And, you know, I'm not going to say it was easy piece of cake, but I moved forward. And with only documentation, Andrew, I signed a settlement with the VA, the Veteran Affairs. And I said I would refuse to not sign a non-disclosure agreement because I was going to, I realized I'd be helping people. So I've been helping people, a lot of people in the last seven years. And, you know, I had Erin Brockovich, for example, on my podcast, you know, almost two years ago, I met her out in Arizona. And one of the creators, the Homeland Security one, know how I did it. You know, how did I settle and, you know, with what I went through and how did I refuse to sign a non-disclosure agreement? And I'll turn it back to you, Andrew. Well, that, I mean, there's a whole lot there we could unpack. But what an amazing, I'm so glad that you spoke up. Like, I think one of the problems, and I'm not sure if it's, I don't, well, I've heard people express in many ways this lack of speaking out, right? Like, you see, I don't know if people aren't taught how to be assertive or if they're not taught how to, you know, the value of their own voice in a given situation. But that is a, that's a concerning piece of that safe workplace. When something's not right, people, it's incumbent upon people to speak up, first of all. Yeah. Go ahead. Absolutely. And OSHA, our government OSHA says that we should work in safe environments. But one thing that not everybody is aware of is that bullying in the workplace is not illegal in any of our 50 states. But discrimination, like racial discrimination, disability, sex, pregnancy, there's, there's quite a few age. Those are illegal. And, you know, when that happens, a lot of times people don't know that they don't understand the difference. They can't afford to go to an employment labor attorney. And so I've taken the time out after writing my first book, you know, was my story and every so many people came to me. And they said, how did you do it? And I thought, well, you know, I'm a nerd, you know, I'm this crazy nerd that has four degrees that the Air Force paid for. And, you know, I have these, you know, 20 something years of HR. So, you know, I've been writing it in a book and the book I've already got a literary agent and I'm going to share what I learned from my experience to help other people because nobody should feel fearful for speaking up about something that's wrong or illegal. Or work in a safe, disrespectful environment. Absolutely. And it's, it's, it's interesting to me, I think we, some empowerment could come from teaching people to ask questions. You know, it isn't always an accusatory statement. You know, you can ask questions about, hey, is what's happening correct? And you know, take that to your supervisor from a questioning perspective and see what kind of answers you get, ask your fellow workers. You know, when it's posed as a question, it's a lot less threatening. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, my biggest thing is documentation because bystanders get scared. They change their story. They're afraid of retaliation. I know everybody that I worked with was scared to be seen with me when I spoke out because they were fearful. Yeah, you know, when my paycheck got turned off, you know, I was living in a big house, you know, by myself on divorce. But, you know, it changed my whole lifestyle. I lost so much. And this happens every day, maybe not to my extent. I think that this all happened for a reason. I mean, I'm not saying that I loved it. I think things happen for a reason. There's no coincidences. It's just part of my journey to help other people to experience it. You know, to be, you know, as Brené Brown says, you know, the person in the ring who's actually going to beat up, you know. I love Brené Brown. Yeah, you got to get, you know, the seats are easy to fill, right? Anybody can stand on the sideline. It's that person in the arena that keeps getting knocked down. I love that. I did a two-day training of that stuff. I teach that to our employees. In fact, we really work on empowerment. You know, so your message as powerful, obviously, taking all that adversity, you know, from rock bottom position and building back up to help others is super important. I wish everyone realized how valuable their stories were. What was the initial engagement? Did you start like with a local community? Did you start talking at church? How did you start to open up and engage the other people and start to teach? Oh, word got out. Word got out really quickly in the VA because, you know, once I settle the settlement, obviously they don't want you to work for them anymore. And, you know, Asheville is not that big of a town, although it's growing. And I'm saying Asheville, North Carolina. Sometimes people hear Nashville like Tennessee. And word got out. People started contacting me. I'm very approachable, very reachable. They get a hold of me through Facebook or LinkedIn. And for the first, I want to say three or four years, it was all VA whistleblowers. They were all speaking up about something wrong, you know, whether it was a nurse or somebody, you know, who worked in a certain department. They'd contact me. And, you know, right after I had settled about seven years ago, you know, I saw a guy, I won't say his name. I mean, he's given me permission, but, you know, I saw he was getting beaten up because he was speaking up about suicides in the VA. And I offered to help him assist him and he ended up getting a very good settlement. And, you know, and this isn't a political thing, but he got his picture with the president and he got recognized for being a whistleblower. And yet I was one behind the scenes, you know, behind the scenes helping him and still have the email track back and forth between us, what to do, what not to do. You know, I can't give employment law advice because I'm an HR person, but one thing I do know how to navigate is HR policies and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission policies. I know that inside now. Do you think there's adequate protection for employees or do you think that like the type of, you know, of retaliation that you received is easy? I don't know, easy, easy to get away with is the way to say it, but do you do you think that in the workplace today, most people are aware of their protections and can really invoke them? Do you think most people just quit after they start getting in trouble or even fear retaliation stops them from even mentioning anything? They just keep their head down and keep working. Oh, gosh. Andrew, it's a little of everything to be quite frank. In the government, the, believe it or not, retaliation is considered a discrimination class, right? So the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has all kinds of archives out there and you can go to eoc.gov and see it yourself. And government agencies have more retaliation and the reason why there's more retaliation, this is my belief, as I've seen it myself, is it takes so long to go to court, to a formal hearing. And the eoc administrative judges are actually traveling judges. They come to the city, but the process and the red tape, it takes forever and ever. And guess what? By law, if you work in a federal agency, you have to go through their grievance program. Well, that's like, you know, a little red Robin Hood in the wolf, you know, going to the wolf saying, I have a complaint against, you know, my agency. But even in, you know, in the public sector, you know, I'm sorry, the private sector, you know, the people who work regular jobs, whether it be Walmart or Target or I don't know, the electric company or something like that. You know, people, the one people I've noticed they live hand to mouth, the average person, and they're not planning for that rainy day of, hey, I could get fired or laid off, you know, and they're spending their money left and right. And I, you know, I teach people, hey, you know, have money to, if you need to go back to school or trade school, certification to become an entrepreneur. You know, for the last seven years, I've worked for myself after working, gosh, 25 years for the government. And it's one of the greatest things for me. To me, I don't know if people understand how difficult that that can be, you know, and this and the expense and the time it could take. And then I think even like you mentioned, in the private sector, there's a lot of that binding arbitration and all these things you've signed. So there's oftentimes no way to actually go and do like some, you know, hire a lawyer, you have to use the arbitration that's set up by the company that you're working for. Absolutely. And the thing is, a lot of attorneys, and rightfully so, they want to be paid. They wanted to make sure it's a sure thing that they're going to get paid. Yeah. You know, when you do a contingency, you know, you better believe rock solid that you're going to, you know, get some money out of it, you know. Yeah, let's because a lot of people do not have their documentation properly written out. And that's what I've been writing about in my books. Good. Yeah, I think so what we'll do, we'll take a break. I want to come back and talk about that documentation piece because that's a that's something that people miss early on and then they're then their memories fuzzy. So we'll take about a one minute break here. We'll pay some bills and we'll be right back with Don Marie Westmoreland. The host of Hawaii together on the think tech Hawaii broadcast network. Hawaii together deals with the problems we face in paradise and looks for solutions, whether it's with the economy, the government or society. We're streamed live on think tech biweekly at 2pm on Mondays. I want to thank you so much for watching. We look forward to seeing you again. I'm Kili Akina. Aloha. Hi everybody and welcome back to Security Matters. We're talking with Don Marie Westmoreland and we're talking about safe and respectful workplaces. We've been going down the sort of that HR world that whistleblower world, the retaliation that can occur. And I wanted to talk about the documentation piece because this is something when things aren't going right for you in the workplace, don't rely on your memory. Start to write this stuff down. And Don, I know you've got some advice you can share perhaps from your experience and maybe from others that you felt along the way. Yeah, absolutely. So I am sometimes jokingly called the queen of documentation. And it has always worked out, you know, I'm going to brag and just say that I've had 100% success with my clients. And I'm not saying that for marketing. It's just I'm proud of them for doing their part. And the thing is, is that if you're being harassed at work, whether it's bullying or you're being discriminated because you have a disability or you're, you know, over 40 in most cases, or maybe you're gay or transgender, if somebody starts harassing you, documentation that has worked best for me is an email trail because you could write notes to the cows come in, right? And say today at 7.02 so-and-so called me, you know, a bad name or made a racial slur. But the thing is, anybody can write that. But if you, let's say, and I'm just making this name up, Johnny says something that's very offensive, you know. What I tell my clients, you know, email him, you know, unless it's so offensive, you need to go to HR or your manager or whoever. And just telling him, you know, hey, you don't appreciate it, be very objective and, you know, very abbreviated and just say, hey, you know, today this morning you called me, you know, an ugly name or offensive name and I find it discriminatory and unacceptable, I'd like you to meet at least talk. Whether Johnny responds back or not, or Susie, you know, responds back or not, you know, print that out, print that documentation out. I'm serious when I say this, print it out. Don't send it home. Don't leave it in your desk because I had my desk violated. Yes, it was government property, but you print it out and you keep it upon your person and you put it in a safe place. That's one good example. And you do that with all things. If you have to have an appointment with HR, you know, you do an email documentation of what, you know, transpired. Whether somebody contacts you or not, contacts you back in and, you know, agrees with you, disagree, you still have proof your email, you know, went to that person. So the reason why I say email is email is constant, is stable, you can print it out, you can take it to an attorney, you could take it to the boss, you could take it to HR, you could take it to a judge, you know, or have it submitted in discovery. You know, you never want to just have it, he said, she said, and I've even actually had people ask me, well, you know, my boss said, you're not allowed to send any emails. And I'm like, you know, to hell with that, you know, I said, if they want to have a face-to-face meeting with you, even with a union representative, you know, have it, but turn around and follow up. And then, you know, do a summary email as I call it, you know, thanks for the, you know, meeting we had it to today. I just want to make sure I understand correctly, you know, the following and keep it very brief. Just hit it right, you know, hit the nail in the head. And then send it, print it out. It's so important not to keep it at work in case somebody breaks into your desk. I mean, that does happen more than people realize. Wow. And if you keep it on your computer, guess what? Your IT person, whoever has control of your computer can delete it in just seconds and not seeing everything just about. Wow. I've been doing this seven years just strictly on bullying and discrimination matters. Isn't that so? Does that make sense? There's more to it, but that's kind of the basics. Sure. Do you think that most frontline management is equipped to deal with complaints of this nature? A lot of times, you know, from working almost three decades in HR, they don't have the training, the leadership skills and there's a difference. You know, you and I both been in the military. We know a difference between a manager and a leader. And so a lot of times you're not equipped with it. And they're some of the first line supervisors are some of the benzias because, you know, if they see somebody being mistreated, you know, they need to address that, you know, maybe it's counseling a talk. And then they need to follow up and document it and then keep a copy of that for their records and possibly a copy for HR or, you know, the management. But what happens often is they'll say they're so busy, they didn't have time to do the documentation, but everybody has rights. And when it comes down to it, if you don't have proof, and that's where documentation is like, it's just the pit of me of truth, you know. If they don't have that, then it's hard to fire somebody because they have rights. Or, you know, for the person who's trying to defend themselves because they are being mistreated, you know, if they don't have something to prove that they reached out to somebody. Question investigation always needs to occur too. I mean, it definitely goes both ways, but it's interesting to me. I don't recall outside of the military that sort of training happening, you know. And again, I was brought into the EEO from the law enforcement in the military, so it was pretty pronounced. In fact, we were sort of going around teaching the commands to document things and to not let, you know, that first complaint that comes up and then you just verbally somebody says something to someone and corrects it. Well, that's, if there's not documentation for that entire transaction didn't happen. And I think people aren't aware of that, you know, from the very beginning documentation plays a critical role in, you know, the resolution of these types of incidents. Yeah, you're absolutely right. I agree with you 100% because, you know, if it ends up you use an attorney, you know, and then it goes through what they call the discovery phase where both sides have to submit evidence that's going to go to the judge. You know, it's the evidence that the judge is going to use. And it's that documentation that's going to likely if it's done properly, that documentation is what's going to help somebody have a better a chance of a better outcome, whether it's employee or an employer. Yeah, there's it seems like in my what I've seen is that oftentimes it's a person can be very subtle, and they're, they're kind of, they're kind of bullying everyone or they're kind of disparaging everyone, but it's just a little and so people people like You hear people say that and I'm like, that's not right, you know, and, but because there's no preponderance of people complaining because it's a simple slide, you know, or whatever. People tend to get away with this behavior, you know, over and over again. A lot of people get praised for being assertive, and there's nothing wrong with being assertive, you know, and driven or ambitious. But when it comes to the fact that somebody is mistreating somebody or taking credit for their word, or a supervisor's, you know, putting someone down in front of, you know, other people when then they should only be publicly telling them compliment. Yeah, it's an issue and we have a real serious engagement issue. There's a bunch of statistics out there is really super high either like in the high 70s or low 80% of people not feeling engaged in the workplace. And there's a good reason because there's a lack of trust lack of engagement communication. I could go on and on and on both sides aren't trusting each other, but it takes a leader to shed, you know, leader of a company I don't care how big or small they are to emulate what he or she, you know, knows his leadership skills, you know, a good balance of taking care of, you know, the goals of the company, but also taking care of the people because people are not resources, you know, their assets, their assets and my gosh, I mean, I think about how far I've gotten in life it's because of other people helping me. Exactly. Is, do you, do you, is there is this changing like I mean from the old guard, you know, the 60s and 70s and 80s do you feel because I mean there has been a really a breath of fresh air from folks as you mentioned Brene Brown and Simon Sinek and there's a lot of people talking about empowering the workforce and how our people are our company and things like that. I mean Richard Branson is a great champion of his people. Do you think it's changing? I mean, are there leaders and managers finally starting to listen? I follow that really, really closely. And I'm seeing that there's more problems going on and even with the low unemployment a friend of mine asked me a civility is getting better in the workplace. But if you go to the EEOC which only, you know, deals with discrimination, you will see that it's not going down. And people are losing good employees because many statistics out there show that the average person who gets bullied is usually men get bullied too. It's not just women, you know, a little bit more than women, a little bit over 50%. But it's usually they're intelligent, they get along with other people. They have a high tolerance their team players, you know, they want to get along. And then you get the people that are insecure, maybe they've had bad mentors in their life, or maybe they have a lot of narcissism or psychopath in them. And, you know, and they're they start mistreating the people. So I'm not seeing a whole lot of improvements. I'm seeing some fantastic books and videos out there by the people you mentioned and more. But it's really a personal choice, you know, to be a leader or not to be a leader. Yeah, and I think, I think, well, at least one more. I mean, we, my wife and I preach so much of this stuff. So I think maybe we're starting around the companies that are doing a better job and we're small business. So it's a little bit easier to teach our and empower our people, you know, to be leaders. We got a minute or so. So what, what's your, what's the number one advice you would give businesses out there, owner, owners and employees to build a safe and respectful workplace today. Ask to talk to the supervisors to the management, you know, ask for open doors if they don't have it. And, you know, for the employee, let them know what their concerns are and ask them to listen to them. As far as, you know, the leadership of the company, the top management, you know, they have to have open doors. It can't be 24 seven, they have to get the job done, but they should, you know, be open to listening and have buy into ideas. Because employees, you know, especially the younger generation with all these tech skills, you know, in this automatic, you know, what am I trying to say, automatic information or automated information. Yeah, artificial information. One of those, it's all coming out where it's replacing people, but people, you know, have the soft skills out there, you know, of getting along. And no matter how smart someone is, if they don't get along with someone else, they're going to get the job done. They're going to bring down productivity in a company. Yeah, productivity is your people and your people are your productivity. Don, thank you so much for joining us today. I appreciate you sharing your insights. I think the audience is going to love it. And I want to talk to you about that show on Monday. We will be back next week with security matters. I hope you can join us. Thanks again, Don. Hello everybody. Thank you.