What do you do if intuition is the only reason you want to take some investigative steps? I think if you’re a young investigator, you need to check in with somebody else and check that intuition. This is because every move you make is expensive for your client. And so
What do you do if an interviewee is unresponsive, and I don’t mean like they’re no longer living, what if they won’t talk to you about setting up your interview, they’re ghosting you? Maybe you complete the interview with you and then they don’t follow up with the documents they
What do you do if you have an investigation about pronoun use? So I’m recording this in July of 2021 and I hope very much that this is the recording that becomes out of date the quickest. So, if you’re doing an investigation about pronouns, you should do some research
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
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
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
