LEGAL
success Investigating
John Krafts (pictured) of Kraft HR Consulting explores the importance of being able to conduct workplace investigations and how that capability should be at the core of management competencies.
Without investigation skills, can you truly work out what’s going on in your business? This might be investigating
customer feedback or a system failure, investigating employee under-performance or misconduct, a data breach or due diligence on a possible business acquisition. It could be investigating an
allegation of bullying or a public interest disclosure. Whatever the circumstances, without the ability to investigate across your environment, you can’t plan, learn and change. If you can’t do that, your customers, regulators, shareholders and boards will soon lose confidence in your business – it could also create legal problems depending on this circumstances. So, given that our managers and
leaders spend a lot of their time investigating and the consequences of getting it wrong are potentially very serious, why don’t we take organisational capability to investigate more seriously? How often do we find that when something goes wrong in our organisations, our people are reticent to conduct the subsequent investigation? At Kraft HR, a large part of our
world revolves around workplace investigations and in our experience, workplace investigations involving employees are very low on the list of things that managers welcome. We know when the call to investigate arises, the project papers commonly get stuck towards the bottom of in- trays and things go off the rails. Why is this? Holding people to
account and having difficult conversations is not something that many people relish the prospect of. Conducting what might be an intense and time-consuming
investigation on top of the day job for already hard pushed employees, when it probably doesn’t contribute to what’s written in personal objectives, sounds like something that most would seek to avoid. In addition, the likelihood of
being held to account as an investigating officer by trade unions, lawyers and courts is something else that introduces anxiety. The spectre of being blamed for investigation failures or discovering organisational failure adds more reasons to duck the challenge. However, the longer you leave it
the worse it will get. We all know that a delay in investigating an incident will inevitably damage the credibility of any investigation outcome. These are commonly recurring problems in our organisations and making the ability to investigate should be a priority to organisations of any size. So, what can you do to introduce investigation resilience into your business?
• Make capability to investigation a priority, and thus part of your organisational learning culture.
• Establish individuals or a team that will be trained to become skilled investigators and to share their investigation skills across the organisation.
• Make sure you have a source of external expertise to assist with investigations or conduct investigations on behalf of your organisation.
• Introduce a competency framework for your managers to enable their capability.
‘The spectre of being blamed for investigation failures or discovering organisational failure adds more reasons to duck the challenge’
• Enable looped learning so that every time your investigators meet a new challenge or identify a failure, others learn from the experience and your organisational process maps and management systems are reviewed and updated.
• Develop frameworks and toolkits for workplace investigations and enable them to evolve to meet the developing needs of your business.
• Spend time scenario planning. For example, how would you deal with an allegation of serious misconduct relating to a senior employee?
• Don’t blame people for identifying failures, rather celebrate learning from discovery and recognise your managers for initiating risk eradication and system improvement.
We help our clients build
resilience into their organisational investigation capability. The benefits include reducing
the prospect of feasible legal claims and building confidence to rebut nuisance litigants and disingenuous claims presented by employee-appointed representatives who aim to induce financial settlement without legal basis. This has particular importance
with the abolition of Employment Tribunal issue fees and the recent 90% increase in claims received by the Employment Tribunals. We also train our clients and
provide them with toolkits to enable their in-house capability, giving managers the confidence to make legitimate and defendable decisions and produce documentation that would stand up to external scrutiny and potential legal action.
business network April 2018 57
Establish a team that will be trained to become skilled investors
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