Organisations are increasingly outsourcing workplace investigations to external and impartial investigators to ensure workplace investigation processes are impartial and robust.
It is a trend that is only likely to increase particularly with the new duty on employers to prevent sexual harassment at work, which the government has committed to introduce.
Our specialist team offers organisations the opportunity to use legal experts to undertake workplace investigations, enabling them to demonstrate impartiality at an early stage and that the matter under investigation is being taken extremely seriously.
It is a welcome development, given it is becoming increasingly challenging in some circumstances for organisations to carry out investigations themselves. This is a result of the:
- greater awareness of and increased focus on discrimination issues through, for example, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements;
- complexity of legal issues involved;
- amount of skilled resource required to deliver the investigation efficiently; and
- increased risk of public and media scrutiny, particularly “trial by social media”.
The team’s experts have the legal knowledge, skills, and expertise to investigate on an organisation’s behalf and take a flexible, collaborative, and, importantly, practical approach. There is no risk of the process becoming too ‘legal’, and organisations outsourcing investigations benefit from essential resource not being over-stretched.
