Treaty Oak Employers’ Law Blog

What do you do if you, as the interviewer or the investigator, are too embarrassed to talk about the topic to be investigated? You need to get off the investigation. There’s really no way around it, because if you can’t engage with the subject matter comfortably and robustly, you are

What do you do if something is wiped off a device? A lot of times employees,. will ctrl-alt-delete everything before they walk out of a workplace. Other times, they just wipe a personal device clean because they want to have closure regarding a former employer.  Most of the time and

What do you do if somebody ends an interview? If somebody walks out of an interview, as the investigator, it’s frustrating, but there’s very little you can control. Sometimes I cover this in my admonishments, but certainly when somebody says that they are done talking to me or just gets

What do you do if you don’t understand the industry you’re being asked to investigate? You are not usually being asked to learn about an industry, you’re typically being asked to learn about human behaviors. And obviously, the financial pressures and character types that are drawn to certain industries are

What do you do if you, as the interviewer or the investigator, are too embarrassed to talk about the topic to be investigated? Simply stated, you need to get off the investigation. There’s really no way around it because if you can’t engage with the subject matter comfortably and robustly,

What do you do if you don’t speak or understand the language of the interviewee? Again, it depends. One of the fundamentals of workplace investigations though, is that people be able to express their concerns and people, sometimes because of language skills, and sometimes because of anxiety, and sometimes because

What do I do if somebody challenges my process? There are parts of my process that are not moveable. I’m not willing to do an investigation if parts of my process are altered. Those are the parts that eliminate bias, that are fair, that are thorough, that are high quality,

What do you do if you need to build rapport with somebody? Rapport building is important for any interview at all, but it becomes particularly important when the nature of the investigation is really sensitive or the person is really nervous, the stakes for them are super high. I try

What do you do when you don’t receive an admission? This is probably the much more likely outcome of an investigation around something like a Title VII or ADEA-type issue. People just don’t think that their own behavior ever rises to the level of being harassment, discrimination, or a hostile

What do you do if you can’t figure out what happened? What do you do if you are not coming to investigative conclusions? First of all, sometimes that happens. Second of all, it doesn’t happen nearly as often as you think, because you probably can come to some investigative conclusions.