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Planning a fair workplace investigation

Workplace investigation: Build a workplace investigation around clear questions, relevant evidence and an open mind.

Anonymised practice examples drawn from cases handled by our team.

Workplace investigation: practical approach

The practical approach is to turn the remit into answerable questions, connect each question to the available evidence and explain discrepancies or limits in the findings. The report should distinguish a witness’s account, an independently supported fact and the investigator’s interpretation. Where an account suggests another relevant witness or document, the guidelines support further checking before closure.

What to check and record

A decision that there is a case to answer should explain why a hearing is justified without deciding the sanction in advance. Equally, a conclusion that the available evidence does not justify escalation should not be obscured by the existence of an allegation. The structure works only when its factual assertions match the investigation that was actually carried out.

Learning for managers

The key lesson is traceability. A reader should be able to move from an allegation to the evidence examined, the reasoning applied and the conclusion reached. Recording an evidential gap is more reliable than filling it with confident language. The number of interviews or pages produced is not, by itself, a measure of investigation quality.

Manager checklist

Write answerable questions
Collect relevant accounts and documents
Test discrepancies and missing evidence
Explain findings separately from the sanction

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