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 with smaller or newer or less sophisticated organizations, they won’t have a policy about all the things that people can do. So if I’m investigating one of the biggies like harassment, discrimination, hostile work environment, things like that, I don’t care that there’s no policy because there are in fact laws. Even beyond that, there are often best practices that the client can point to. I don’t need to point to it because I’m trying to find out if something happened or didn’t happen. I’m certainly not going to be referring to their policies if they don’t have any. But if, at the end of the day, the client says, “Well, we’ve never come up with this, but I think the best practice is that we don’t let people steal from us. That should be our policy, even though we never had it before.” At the end of the day, I’m only just investigating whether or not somebody stole from you. My findings rarely make a determination about a policy and a lack of a policy simply means I won’t reference it in my report.
