What do you do if somebody calls you after their interview? If it’s the day or two after the interview and not a year later, I generally take those calls willingly. As investigators, most of the time, if we’ve done our jobs right, people don’t know that they are coming
What do you do to let your accused individual know that they are the accused in your investigation? I’ve talked about in other interviews, how I am very careful, never to bring other interviews into a current interview. And that includes the reporting party’s interview into the accused interview. And
What do I do to admonish an interviewee? My admonishments include introducing my law firm, introducing myself, introducing who I am, my role in this process. I generally will talk about the methods of investigation that are possible. I do that in part so that I can make the point
What do you do if someone makes additional allegations during one of your interviews? This can happen either when you are interviewing the reporting party or one of the other witnesses along the way. And it partially depends on the client, in part how well you know the client. For
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 when somebody keeps repeating themselves? This can be hard because people do this when they’re nervous. And so if somebody keeps repeating themselves and it’s irrelevant, make sure you ask them what the relevance of their comments is. And that might be a hard question for
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
