A manager browsing her personal social media learns that one of her direct reports is gay. He is not out at work. She never tells him what she saw, but she starts steering team social activities toward LGBTQ+ inclusive events and raising Pride Month more pointedly in team meetings. Eventually he confronts her, saying she is signaling that she knows and violating his privacy. She insists her intentions were positive. D’Mar Phillips, VP of People and Culture at RS Americas, took up the scenario, called The Social Media Outing, with HR Voices host Rebecca Taylor.
The scenario is fabricated, but D’Mar’s first reaction was that it happens all the time. Neither he nor Rebecca saw malice in it. That leaves HR with two questions: whether well-meant inclusion can itself become harassment, and what a manager owes an employee about something she learned outside of work.
Why Good Intent Does Not Settle the Question
Rebecca called it a true story of intent versus impact. D’Mar’s read was that both people feel validated, which leaves HR in the middle, calming the situation and listening to both parties.
What struck him as unclear was motive. The employee never asked his manager for more inclusion, so her response rested on an assumption, and the post itself might be wrong. “It could be fake. It could be false,” he said. How much to share about sexual orientation at work is the employee’s decision, and without his confirmation the manager was guessing.
The impact side is heavier. D’Mar describes being outed as an event with consequences, and he holds that employees need a level of psychological safety in the work environment. Staying private at work is common. A Williams Institute survey of 1,902 LGBTQ adults in the workforce found that 46 percent are not open about being LGBTQ with their current supervisor, and 21 percent are not out to any coworker.
How Personal Information Becomes Company Risk
D’Mar’s rule is short: “personal social media information is not work knowledge or work information.” It cannot be used to hurt someone, or even to lift someone up, because it has nothing to do with the work. We devoted a full webinar to where personal social media meets ER.
An emergency is different. A post threatening coworkers demands action, and failing to act would be the company’s fault. A person’s private life does not, and there HR sometimes has to make “the choice of just doing nothing.” Another HR Voices case tested the same boundary with an employee’s off-duty political post.
D’Mar holds that managers carry “a greater duty of care,” and he extended the scenario to show the risk. The employee is later passed over for promotion and says it happened because the manager knew he was gay. Swap in any other protected class, he noted, and the claim still rings true.
In Bostock v. Clayton County, the Supreme Court held in 2020 that an employer who fires someone merely for being gay or transgender violates Title VII. So D’Mar also calls the legal team. He will not call that playing it by the book, because in his view “95 percent of HR is gray.”
What Actually Works
Start With the Employee, in a Separate Conversation
D’Mar would talk to both people, but never together, and the employee comes first because he has “seemingly more at stake.” That first conversation establishes where the employee is emotionally and whether he still feels safe at work. D’Mar would offer the employee assistance program, a counselor outside HR, and outside organizations such as the Trevor Project, a crisis intervention nonprofit for LGBTQ+ young people.
Being outed “starts its own level of internal turmoil,” he said, and a grieving process follows because the employee “did not control the narrative.”
Ask the Manager About Motive Without Assigning Blame
The manager conversation is a repair, not a reprimand. D’Mar wants to understand what she was thinking, whether that was a value she was trying to uphold or a cry for help she thought she heard. He warns HR to be “careful not to assign blame.”
Then he sizes the damage by asking whether she told anyone. If nobody else knows who the gestures were aimed at, he sees a good chance of repairing it. Repair gets harder if the employee’s reaction has given other people “a license to act out.”
Give Both People a Path Back
Repair takes several conversations, and D’Mar counsels patience over a rash decision. He would tell the employee that his feelings are valid, that the manager shared her assumption with no one, and that it remains unconfirmed. He would also commit that orientation has no bearing on how the company invests in his career, and that the manager is in no position to hold an assumption against him.
HR cannot force forgiveness. It can offer follow-up conversations and mentoring that helps the manager understand LGBTQIA+ sensitivities. “Both parties are redeemable,” D’Mar said, and “they should not leave as angry enemies.”
Where Employee Relations Fits
Rebecca noticed something the scenario gets right. The employee felt safe enough to bring this to HR. Many do not. People absorb microaggressions at work, she said, and “usually raise their hands after three, four, five incidents,” once a pattern is visible.
D’Mar reads that trust as earned. Where it is missing, people “suffer in silence,” mute their voices, and quietly quit. He sees HR as the liaison between employees and the business, which is the daily substance of employee relations work. In his telling, neither the employee nor the manager is always right.
Rebecca’s rule is to build habits before introducing tools, because a tool can only hold what people feel safe sharing. Where that safety exists, an anonymous reporting channel gives an employee a way to raise the first incident without waiting for the fifth.
Frequently Asked Questions About Outing, Privacy, and Social Media at Work
Treat it as information that does not belong at work. D’Mar’s rule is that personal social media is not work knowledge, so no decision about the employee should rest on it.
They can create that exposure. D’Mar notes the employee could frame targeted gestures as harassment or discrimination. Whether the conduct meets the hostile environment standard depends on the facts.
The employee, in a separate conversation. D’Mar starts there because the employee has more at stake, and HR needs to assess the damage before asking what the manager intended.
Listening comes first, then resources. D’Mar would offer the employee assistance program and a counselor outside HR, because being outed sets off a grieving process the employee did not choose.
Yes. D’Mar’s view is that the worst thing HR can do is assume the issue will go away. Legal lays out the options and the exposure, and the People leader still makes the decision.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
D’Mar Phillips’s framing of his own job explains his choices in this scenario. “I will be people first. That is my DNA,” he said, and he was just as clear that people-first does not mean people-only. He ties the value of the business to the strength of its people.
That is why neither person in The Social Media Outing gets written off. The manager’s mistake was not that she cared about inclusion. It was that she acted on information that was never hers to use.
See how AllVoices helps People teams give every employee a safe way to raise a concern.
