While you’re here, you may wish to attend one of our upcoming workshops:
Conducting Sexual Misconduct Investigations
If someone at your organization says they’ve been sexually harassed or sexually assaulted, how should you investigate and establish the facts? These complaints can be uniquely challenging for internal investigators — but are more common than ever before. This hands-on, advanced-level training is a must for any frontline staff who may respond to and/or investigate such complaints.
I was thinking this past week about the FIFA world cup qualifying match between France and Ireland. If you haven’t heard, France won after their captain allegedly handled the ball, resulting in the winning goal. Irish fans were irate that the captain of the French team did not admit his alleged violation.
In the workplace, we often hear of employees engaging in improper or even illegal behaviour and the question is “why don’t they just admit it?” I’m not a psychologist so I won’t speculate on motivation, but what we can say as employment lawyers is that employees should always acknowledge their misdeeds in the workplace.
Meeting the standard necessary to establish just cause for employee termination is difficult for employers, but it gets increasingly easier when an employee lies about his or her behaviour. Recent case law is replete with examples of occasions where just cause is found, not because of what the employee actually did, but because they lied about it. A word to the wise employee: “just ‘fess up!”
Christine M. Thomlinson
