You Might Think Twice About Unfriending a Work Colleague After Reading This

The lesson is, then, don’t unfriend your work colleagues, no matter how annoyed you are at them.

The owner of the agency was Mrs Bird’s husband, James Bird.

Bird, who is the wife of the principal, accused her colleague of being like “a$3 naughty little school girl running to the teacher”.

Roberts later discovered that Bird had unfriended her on Facebook, when she logged in to see the if her colleague had posted about the incident.

Diagnosed with depression and anxiety, Ms Roberts was medicated and given psychological counselling and was signed off work. She also found that this behaviour posed a risk to Rachael’s health and safety.

The tribunal also found that Mrs Bird acted unreasonably when she did not acknowledge Ms Roberts in the morning and delivered photocopying and printing to other employees but not Ms Roberts. She went on to add that this showed “a lack of emotional maturity and is indicative of unreasonable behaviour”.

The last straw came when Bird unfriended Roberts after a rather unpleasant meeting that left her in tears.

The claim was brought under the controversial bullying provisions of the Fair Work Act, which allows the tribunal to make orders to “stop bullying at work” but does not allow it to award compensation.

She said the alleged behaviour, which occurred between November 2013 and January 2015, resulted in her being unable to sleep, depressed and highly anxious, requiring medication from her GP and psychologist.

Calling her a “schoolgirl” was “provocative and disobliging”, she added.

Ms Roberts, a real estate agent for more than 10 years who joined the company in 2012, cited almost 20 run-ins, primarily with Mrs Bird, in which she claimed she was “belittled and humiliated”.

Legal experts said the case did not mean that unfriending a colleague on Facebook would automatically constitute bullying.

A workplace tribunal in Tasmania found that a Facebook unfriending constituted an example of bullying.