Treaty Oak Employers’ Law Blog

What do you do if you are investigating something really traumatic? Unfortunately, as workplace investigators, we occasionally have to investigate some really awful stuff. People get killed at work. People get raped at work. Some truly awful things happen at work and workplace investigators get called into some of that

How do we investigate gaslighting? So gaslighting, to my knowledge, is not a crime anywhere, but the effects and the reasons for gaslighting somebody can be awful in the workplace, right? So gaslighting is the use of psychological means to make somebody doubt their own sanity. And if someone is

What do you do if you, as the investigator, get really embarrassed? Pull yourself together. You are there to be a neutral, unbiased, third party. And as such, you can’t be judgmental. And a lot of embarrassment comes from judgment. And so, your work is about appropriateness and inappropriateness in

What do you do if the person you’re interviewing is represented by an attorney? The answer is probably whatever your client wants you to do. So, if the client allows its employees to have legal representation in their interview that is up to that client and you need to handle

What do you do if the interviewee asks for a witness? As attorneys always say, it depends. If the interviewee is a member of a union, they have a right, according to the Supreme Court of the United States, to have a witness. And so they need to get a

What do you do if someone is being abusive to you during an interview? This has come up with me on phone interviews and also in person interviews. At the end of the day, you are not being paid to be abused. That being said, the nature of workplace investigations

What do you do if your interviewee does not participate in the investigation, or does not know what you are asking them? That’s kind of two different issues. So, if the person does not participate in the investigation, you need to, again, remind them that their employer expects them to

What do you do when someone hands you hundreds of hours of recordings from the workplace? First of all, you can’t ignore that information. If somebody provided you that evidence of their claim, you’ve got to absorb it and analyze it. But the way that we handle that most frequently

What do you do with hearsay and rumors? You collect them. I tell people quite often things like, “Why do you know that?” or, “Who told you that?” And they’ll tell me, “Oh, I heard it third hand,” or sometimes people will say, “Well, I do know something, but I

What do you do if your interview is going way too long? It is reasonable for somebody to go an hour without a break. I think best practice, just like Zoom school, you go 50 minutes, you get a 10 minute break, you come back. That’s probably best practice. If