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Under Ontario’s human rights jurisprudence, when an employee raises a complaint of discrimination, the employer has a duty to address that complaint. The employer’s response to a complaint, including the investigation it undertakes, must meet a standard of “reasonableness.”
La plainte est généralement l’acte originel de toute enquête en milieu de travail. Elle est autrement dit le signal d’alerte qui active une série de mécanismes depuis l’évaluation de son sérieux par l’employeur jusqu’à l’ultime décision sur la manière de l’adresser.
The complaint is typically the originating act of any workplace investigation. It is the “code red” that activates a series of mechanisms, from the assessment of its seriousness by the employer, to the ultimate decision on how to address it.
This is the second in a series of blog posts that I will be writing on data and investigations.
To recap, workplace investigations are also an invaluable source of data that organizations can use in a variety of ways – outside of the investigation process – to help their workplaces get into the zone – the optimal workplace that is characterized by respect, civility, tolerance, inclusivity, and no, or few, employment-related legal problems.
Writing about credibility is one of the most challenging aspects of workplace investigation reports. As someone who reviews a lot of reports, I find that investigators usually have a good sense of who is credible and who is not, but they can struggle to write about how they assessed credibility. This is especially true of newer investigators.
In the course of a workplace investigation, it is not unusual to encounter a respondent who simply denies the allegations, without offering any further information or explanation. While a simple denial may sometimes be a sufficient response to an allegation, there are instances where there is seemingly more to the story than what the respondent is offering.
It is not out of the ordinary for our firm to conduct workplace investigations involving very senior leaders – presidents, CEOs, senior vice-presidents, partners (in the case of law and accounting firms, for example), school principals, and even board members. While complaints against these individuals may not be the norm, they certainly do exist.
A workplace investigation will often start with an internal dispute between co-workers. The issue for an investigator will usually be to hear the evidence and to determine what was said or done, and to then determine whether the conduct in question was contrary to the standard of behaviour expected under an organization’s policies.
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