Union Investigations: A Minefield of Legalese
Dear Overworked Professionals, We know you’re busy navigating a sea of HR nightmares, so let’s cut to the chase: Union investigations are a special kind of hell. Brace yourselves. (Oh, and some of this union stuff applies to your non-union employees too.) Weingarten Rights: The Gift That Keeps on Giving Remember that delightful little concept […]
Legal Research’s Guidance on When to Hire an Investigator
According to new legal research of statutory and case law, when you are facing a workplace issue, it is important to have all the information you need to make the best decision. An employer investigation can be a valuable tool in gathering information and determining the facts of a case. However, it is important to […]
What do I do if someone will not give me a straight answer during a workplace investigation?
First of all, we need to check our bias. Some languages are not as straightforward as English and not as straightforward as American English. And so, particularly if we have someone where English or the US culture is not their native culture, we need to check that they are not simply nervously communicating. Investigations are […]
What do I do if someone lies to me during a workplace investigation?
What do you do when someone is lying to you or you think someone is lying to you? First and foremost, you are there to be a neutral person whose primary role is to collect facts. And so I think you tell the person that you have concerns about the integrity of the things they’re […]
What do I do if someone wants to argue with me during a workplace investigation?
What do you do if somebody wants to argue with you during your investigation? Sometimes a person being argumentative is a component of the allegation you’re there to investigate, right? Being incredibly antagonistic could be an element of a bullying allegation or, say a hostile work environment allegation. That being said, you need to do […]
What do I do about the quality of my investigation during a workplace investigation?
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 […]
What do I do to investigate pronoun use during a workplace investigation?
What do you do if your investigation involves the use of different pronouns? I’m recording this video in July of 2021 and hoping that this is the video that ages the worst because we make so much societal progress here. As an investigator, I think the first thing you do is to make sure that […]
What do I do if the reporting party is a non-employee during a workplace investigation?
What do you do when the complaining party is not an employee? The same thing that you do anyway. So, you investigate those complaints because it doesn’t matter who makes the complaint. You as an employer are now on notice that you have a harasser, discriminator, or bad actor in your employment. And that is […]
What do I do if I screw up an investigation during a workplace investigation?
https://youtu.be/Ikjy3ftrGLI What do you do if you screw up an investigation? I’d be lying if I said I’ve never screwed anything up. I don’t think I’ve ever screwed up a whole investigation, I’ve done some things that I’ve had to redo. And I think that’s just it, part of doing an investigation, part of doing […]
What do I do if the reporting party is ‘crazy’ during a workplace investigation?
What do you do if your reporting party is acting crazy? And even though she’s using the sort of magic words things like harassment and discrimination, you think that the real issue is that the person is crazy, not that they’re being discriminated against. As the employer or the investigator stepping into the employer’s shoes, […]
