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 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
What do you do with inconvenient facts? First off, what is meant by inconvenient facts? Say you’ve got 10 facts that all prove your investigative conclusion and then you’ve got one fact that disproves your investigative conclusion. You need to love and embrace that inconvenient fact with all your heart.
In early February of 2020, the New York Times published an article by Nicholas Kristof, an Op-Ed columnist, about a U.S. Bank customer service representative fired for helping a stranded customer on Christmas Eve. In the article, Kristof goes on to explain how a U.S. Bank customer was stranded without
2017 was an intense year for workplace investigations. It was the year that the proverbial curtain opened and the entire world became aware of the harassment occuring in certain industries. We saw powerful men finally fall because of their lewd actions and their inappropriate use of power. While 2017 brought
