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As workplace investigators, throughout the investigation process we often field requests from respondents (or their representatives) for additional information or materials. They may request further particulars of the complainant’s allegations, witness names, documents, notes or recordings.
As workplace investigators, we can sometimes find ourselves in situations with complainants, where it feels as though we are not fully grasping what a complainant is alleging. These situations made me reflect on tools that I have used to help steer me in the right direction to better understand a complainant’s allegations.
In the last blog in this series, I gave some intake tips for communicating with whistleblowers. In this blog, I write about how to approach whistleblower investigations.
The difficulty in conducting these investigations is that there is often very little information to go on…
Remote work was once considered a privilege. Requests to work from home were largely denied and granted only in special cases. As the March 2020 lockdown went into full effect and office buildings emptied, once bustling downtown cores became near ghost towns. For the last fifteen months, remote work has been the status quo. Fears of low employee productivity have largely been allayed. In fact, some organizations have spent in the millions building up VPNs and infrastructure to enable remote work.
This is a question that I have had to answer a few times in the last year. Here is a description of each process and the main differences between the two.
What seems like a really long time ago, I wrote in one of my blogs that I would be doing a series on whistleblowing. It seemed like a great idea at the time: there isn’t that much practical information about whistleblowing out there and I have a lot to share on the topic given that I have done work in this field for many years. But then, a pandemic happened, and my “series” didn’t quite get off the ground. I’ve come back to the topic, though, as I’ve been fielding some questions about it lately.
On the evening of Sunday, March 7, I, along with 17 million other people, tuned in to watch Oprah’s interview of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. I am the first to admit that I wanted to hear all the details about their decision to step back as “senior” members of the Royal Family, but as an investigator, I also was also interested in how Oprah approached the interview – how she asked her questions, what she asked, and how Harry and Meghan would respond.
Most workplace investigations are not subject to independent review; though they may be considered by a court or tribunal, this would usually be in the context of a separate legal proceeding, e.g., a wrongful dismissal action or a human rights case. Certain investigations, however, may include the exercise of a statutory power of decision, which may give a party a right to pursue a judicial review to challenge the conclusions reached. In such a case, the court may directly address issues such as fairness and the reasonableness of the decision reached in the course of an investigation.
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