What do you do if your investigative conclusions are that your accused individual is just a meanie? You conclude that your accused individual is just a meanie! Thats all there is to it. It is not illegal to be a meanie. I think there’s a lot of arguments to be made that it is not an inefficient way to operate a business because of turnover or people more concerned about their emotional integrity than doing their actual jobs. But at the end of the day, if it’s the employer’s choice to keep an employee on staff who is a meanie, then your accused gets to stay on staff. The way that that can cross the line, though, is if your meanie is causing a hostile work environment, or a toxic work environment, or being a bully. And we have to remember as investigators that our evaluations come back to a reasonable person standard. So yes, maybe they’re a gigantic meanie, but as long as they are an equal opportunity meanie, and they’re mean to all people, all races, all abilities, all genders, things like that, is their meanness so bad that a reasonable person considers it toxic or hostile? And you can establish that sometimes just by counting. Seven people said that it was a hostile environment. Two people said it was not. Therefore, the larger number is the reasonable number, and that person is being the meanie in a way that the reasonable mass of the interviewed people found to be hostile, or toxic, or whatever the accusation is.
