What can we do to ensure the quality of our investigations? So particularly when you’re in-house, and I suppose I’m speaking to somebody in a leadership role, but if you’ve got a team of investigators, who are making sure that your investigators are doing a good job? Even if those investigators have all of their investigations reviewed by management before they’re closed out, who’s making sure that that manager is up to speed on current thinking and current expectations of quality and thoroughness and the logic of harassment, of the sense of discrimination these days?
You can have people review each other for grammar, collect the proper documents, and save items in the correct format. But you need to get out to somebody who is seeing the litigation around these cases, in some form or fashion, to be able to know. Or even get out to the academics who are thinking about these investigations to tell if your in-house experiments are being done in a way that maintains litigation expectations. And the modern, up-to-date analytics around how harassment is calculated, how harassment is measured, or how discrimination is determined.
And so, a great way to do that is to get a third-party audit of your investigation. So many of these great, I will always say, gate credentialed investigator firms will be willing to and able to usually for an hourly rate or some blanket rate of three reviews a quarter, whatever you negotiate. To go into your systems and say, “I randomly pulled these three investigations, and I read them, and I reviewed him. And this is what I think about how things could be better. Oh, by the way, I’ve noticed this trend in you guys not observing discrimination based on gender. Or not recognizing that positive stereotypes are also harmful and illegal.” Whatever it is. So a good way is to ask somebody to occasionally come in from outside and look at and give a critical review of the investigations that your team is doing to ensure that they’re up to intellectual sort of academics around discrimination issues. And also up to par concerning current litigation expectations.
