Employers Blog

It's hard as a human investigator to hear that you are the cause of somebody walking out on your interview. But almost certainly that's what people are going to tell you on their way out the door.

The value of a workplace investigation has different importance to people depending on where they are in, sort of, the crisis cycle or the concern cycle.

What do you do if you stumble across some unrelated, bad information? You tell the client, for sure. You document that you told the client, for sure. As a business practice, you make sure the client understands the value of what you uncovered for them.

What do you do when you have a union in your workplace? You better know what you're doing. So, if people are in a union, they have a union contract, and they also have rights protected by the case law of the United States Supreme Court.

Even as a third party external investigator, it's important that I be able to identify what should trigger an investigation. Not every client is completely sophisticated about title seven triggers and other employment-based triggers for investigation. Simultaneously, no client is excited about spending money on an investigation. So you better be able to sell your services just a little bit.

What do you do if you are concerned about the nature of the underlying claim, the series of facts, the incident being so complicated that you can't investigate it? I think step one is reminding yourself: you wouldn't be doing this work if you were not an intelligent person.

Most of the workplace investigations that are done are around Title Seven, Title Nine policy type issues. And it's a lot of human activity analysis – which, when you get down to it, looking at human behaviors usually doesn't need specialized knowledge. But sure, there are other things that can come up within an investigation that do require specialized knowledge.

Sometimes, this comes up with incidents that involve sexuality – a lot of times. But it could also come up with somebody's personal credentialing or their career, like if they're a little embarrassed of their slow career progress, or their family, or something like that.

It really depends what they need, but we don't... We can be empathetic, but we can't be therapeutic. We can be stern, but we can't be aggressive. And short of that, I think the answer about what tone we use with any particular interviewee is based on what they need.

How do you maintain investigative confidentiality when the nature of the questions you're asking basically tells people what you're investigating? I think this is a little bit less of an issue than it used to be, because people have gotten somewhat savvy to the workplace investigation - but also because post-MeToo and post-Black Lives Matter, people know what companies spend money on to investigate.