“As HR professionals conducting workplace investigations, we have to sort through the two stories, determine the most likely chain of events, and take action accordingly.”
By Stephanie Hammerwold
Early in my HR career, an employee came to me saying that her supervisor had cornered her in a hallway and demanded a kiss. Most of the harassment complaints I have dealt with involve situations where joking gets out of hand or employees are making inappropriate comments and gestures. If this employee’s complaint was true, I knew we had a much more serious situation — one that could result in termination of the supervisor. In this post, we’ll look at how to conduct a thorough workplace investigation by looking at this example.
GET THE FACTS
The challenging thing with any complaint like this is that there’s often not much evidence beyond the stories of the complainant and the accused. As HR professionals conducting workplace investigations, we have to sort through the two stories, determine the most likely chain of events, and take action accordingly.
Obtaining the truth is the hardest aspect of workplace investigations. Rarely is there a smoking gun and often there are conflicting versions of events. That is why it is important to conduct a thorough investigation to come to an accurate conclusion.
After I got over my initial shock, I asked the employee to tell me in detail what happened. The employee worked at a packing station in our busy warehouse. She explained that the supervisor passed her a note that said to meet him in the hallway behind the bathroom. The hallway was dark and led to vacant office space, so it was rarely used. The supervisor and employee took two different doors to the hallway. The employee told me of the exchange that happened there, which involved the supervisor cornering her and asking for a kiss several times before the employee fled from the hallway.
I knew it was going to be hard to prove what happened because there were no witnesses. It could come down to the story of the employee and the story of the supervisor. This is why it is a good idea to have two people conducting interviews in challenging investigations; it gives you two perspectives.
There are security cameras in the main part of the warehouse, but not in the hallway. If we could review the camera footage, we might be able to see the note being passed as well as the supervisor and employee walking toward the two separate doors that led to the hallway. I asked the employee what time the incident happened, and I also asked her where she put the note. She said she threw it in the trash by her packing station before heading back to the hallway. The important thing is that we kept asking questions to elicit details. We didn’t know what minute details might lead us to concrete information to back up the employee’s story.
The next step would normally be interviewing witnesses, but we didn’t have any in this case. So we skipped ahead to reviewing security camera footage, which showed some kind of exchange between the two at the employee’s packing station before each took a separate route to the hallway. Both emerged from separate doors a few minutes later. The things we saw confirmed parts of the employee’s story. Unfortunately the angle of the camera made it unclear if a note was passed from the supervisor to the employee. We needed the note. So my coworker and I put on gloves and began to sift through trash. We found the note in the supervisor’s writing, and we were also able to find a notepad on the supervisor’s desk that was of the same paper as the note.
CONFRONT THE ACCUSED
With the note in hand, we thought things were pretty straightforward, but, as with any investigation, it’s important to give the accused a chance to tell their side. Sometimes this may involve getting the story of the accused and then going back to the complainant to get more information. Although it wasn’t the case in this example, talking to the accused can sometimes turn up history between the accused and the complainant.
We confronted the accused with the basics of the story the employee gave us. He denied it. We then showed him the note. He denied that he wrote it. When we asked why the security camera footage showed him going to the hallway, he said he was going to the bathroom. We asked him if there was any reason the employee would fabricate this story, and he said he couldn’t think of anything. We ended up suspending the supervisor, pending further investigation.
TAKE APPROPRIATE ACTION
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Photo credit olarte.ollie
