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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.
In organizational contexts, people are often familiar with investigation processes and workplace assessments as the “go to” measures to resolve complaints or conflicts in the workplace. These are important and necessary processes, but workplace restoration is in fact also an option, though not often considered.
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…
In the last blog in this series, I wrote about the reporting channels that organizations may use to allow whistleblowers to report wrongdoing. In this blog, I’ve provided an overview of the types of wrongdoing that whistleblowers report. I’ve chosen this topic because many may be unfamiliar with what workplace whistleblowing actually “looks” like. While it is true that we at times hear about whistleblowing in the media, the cases we hear about may not be a good representation of the types of wrongdoing that workplace whistleblowers typically report.
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.
In the last blog in this series, I wrote about whistleblower policies. I indicated in that blog that these policies should include information about the channels that whistleblowers can use to report wrongdoing in their workplace. This blog is about these reporting channels.
Several of my investigations have led me to reflect on the phenomenon of “groupthink,” and how it impacts the workplace and intrudes upon workplace investigations. Groupthink is a term that was first coined by social psychologist Irving Janis, and refers to a group that, when working together, strives for harmony and consensus above all else.
