Calm, common sense support
No problem. You’re in the right place. We conduct this kind of activity tactfully and discreetly for a number of our customers. It’s often a good way to keep a potentially difficult situation calm and factual, and avoid it becoming heated and emotional.
The key is to get us involved fast. It’s important not to prejudge or jump to conclusions - we don’t and we’ll make sure the impressions you create are similarly fair and impartial.
We’ll support you in managing any communications and interactions with the employee and anyone else, so that if you do need to take robust action and, for example, initiate a dismissal process at the end of our fact-finding exercise, there can be no valid criticism of what you’ve done and you have a strong evidential trail available.
How we help you
There are two different ways in which we can support you. You can either ask us to take care of it for you from start to finish, in which case we’ll sensitively but firmly run your internal investigation process and conclude with a report that you can share with the employee and use to communicate your intended decision.
You should reasonably expect the entire process to take between 5 and 15 working days. At the end of this period, you’ll have our report and conclusions. If you opt for this approach, we won’t be able to give you employment law advice, as our role is purely that of impartial investigator.
Alternatively, we can guide you through each step of the fact-finding process enabling you to conduct the fact-finding yourself and we’ll then analyse what you discover and recommend next steps. It’s often more cost-effective for you to take this alternative route, if you have the time and appetite to do it.
Fact-finding often takes longer under this method but that doesn’t mean it’s any less robust in the outcome. You can, however, expect more interactions with us during this period as we look to test what you find and raise queries about what else might be discoverable. A reasonable expectation of time frame will be down to how quickly you’re able to carry out the fact-finding, but we’d normally expect it to be 10 to 25 working days.
What next?
If you get to this stage, and it turns out the employee has not behaved appropriately and your business is at risk, we can guide you through the next stage very easily too.
