Workplace Investigations
We offer independent, legally defensible workplace investigations for employers who need neutral external investigators to help support staff, enhance workplaces, and meet legal obligations under local legislation including human rights codes and occupational health and safety acts.
Independent investigators can be particularly useful when your internal human resources staff can’t investigate safely or credibly. Please contact us for a cost estimate or for more information about our workplace investigation services.
Why choose SLG?
Workplace investigators at SLG offer the following benefits:
Licensed lawyers with advanced and nuanced knowledge of the ever-developing legal framework of workplace investigations and human rights law.
Independence, confidentiality, and neutrality.
The capacity and expertise to handle complex and high-profile matters.
Procedurally sound, person-centred, trauma-informed investigations.
Efficiency and decades of investigation experience.
Fully bilingual (French and English) investigations and reporting.
Investigation Process
Our retainers set out the investigation mandate, including what allegations are being investigated and which workplace policies and legislation will be applied.
We engage employers in a detailed discussion of the issues under investigation and of the workplace’s needs, ensuring we understand your desired investigation timeline, reporting needs, and any other relevant context. We work with employers to explore options to add efficiencies and control costs at this and every stage of the investigation.
We offer process suggestions when needed to ensure the investigation meets the highest standards of efficiency and legal soundness. We will immediately advise if the proposed timelines aren’t feasible for any reason.
Intake and Retainer
We review all relevant workplace policies, complaint documents, and support documents in detail and plan our investigation approach.
Investigation Planning
We interview complainants and respondents (the “parties”) and relevant witnesses, usually by videoconference to lower costs and allow interviewees to speak with us from a safe, private space. We make sure everyone understands that our investigations are confidential and that reprisal is forbidden. Sometimes we hold follow-up interviews with the parties when we learn significant new information, to ensure they have a chance to respond before we make findings.
We collect and analyze relevant evidence.
We provide ongoing updates to employers as we investigate, letting them know when each of our interviews has been scheduled and when we’re moving on to findings and legal analysis.
Investigation
We make our findings and conduct our analysis using the legal standard of a “balance of probabilities,” or whether something is more likely than not to have happened. We must be at least 51% convinced that something occurred to find that it did.
We make factual findings to decide whether the alleged conduct occurred, and then, for any substantiated conduct, we do a legal analysis to decide whether the conduct breached any relevant workplace policies or legislation.
Findings and Legal Analysis
We produce an investigation report tailored to the employer’s needs, ensuring our process and reasoning are clearly articulated and that any decisions you make based on our work are legally defensible. To that end, all our reports are peer-reviewed by another lawyer before they are shared with our clients.
Some employers also ask us to make recommendations for how to respond to conduct that we found to be in breach of policy or legislation.
Reporting and Recommendations
Investigations are wonderful tools to help workplaces discover what happened, but they’re not designed to fully address the underlying relational dynamics or the lasting impacts of what took place. To address this gap, SLG offers employers post-investigation workplace restoration services tailored to identifying and repairing relationships and to restoring your team’s full potential.
Restoration can be an excellent tool to discover the root cause of a conflict, and it can also allow parties to accept accountability and move forward more productively than formal discipline alone can achieve.
If an investigation leads to findings that a respondent has engaged in harassment or bullying, for example, a restoration process guided by an experienced SLG mediator can create a safe and productive space for complainants to share the impacts of the respondent’s actions, and to identify what the parties need to rebuild trust and strengthen team communication. Our process focuses on addressing harm through active engagement from the parties involved, allowing them to accept responsibility for their actions in a meaningful way, and providing a solid basis for a healthy work environment moving forward.
SLG is pleased to offer flat rates for our workplace restoration services.
Optional Post-Investigation Restoration
