Treaty Oak Employers’ Law Blog

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 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.

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 if there’s no policy related to the issue that you’re investigating? People get caught up in this and it doesn’t really concern me one way or the other. If a client has hired me to investigate a thing, I’m going to go investigate that. Sometimes, particularly

What do you do if you are asked by somebody involved in the investigation about the progress of your investigation? It’s happened a couple of times to me that I’ve been at a workplace and maybe I’ve left the interview room and somebody that I’ve interviewed sees me and says,

How do we investigate bias? Bias is sometimes used as a soft word for discrimination, but at the end of the day, we are trying to measure if people are treated differently, either by a system that’s implemented or by direct managerial input of a human. So, regardless of if