Agencies that care about their culture and creating a positive work environment provide higher-level jobs and better pay to high-performing staff only if they treat their co-workers with respect.  In contrast, agencies that don’t care about values or culture tolerate bad behavior by promoting “high-performers” regardless of how they treat their co-workers, which makes the agency an unattractive workplace and reduces its capabilities over time.  By ensuring that all employees are treated with dignity, respect and fairness, HR investigators make their agencies a better place to work.

Employees are much more apt to believe they’ve been treated fairly if they believe in the processes that determine who is (and is not) a high-value employee.  Employees will not believe in HR processes if they experience sexual harassment, abusive or bullying behavior, or if they believe a co-worker was promoted based on friendship rather than great work.  Their trust is unlikely to be restored until they see the bad behavior punished – which is the job of an HR investigative team.

Because it’s an HR team’s job to determine how well agencies are following processes, it’s critical that the team’s own processes are consistent.  There’s little reason for employees to have confidence in any HR processes if even employee investigations are handled differently from one case to another.

Each case of the same type should receive the same level of attention, go through the same investigative process and face the same burden of proof.  This should be true regardless of the investigators assigned to the case or the seniority of the employee.  To do otherwise risks more than just the agency’s credibility with its employees – it also opens the HR department to accusations of discrimination and bias.

How much confidence do you have that your processes ensure similar treatment for similar cases regardless of the assigned investigator?  Can you defend the consistency of your process with aggregated case data demonstrating similar treatment of similar cases?  If you have confidence in the consistency of your own processes, it’s much easier to have confidence in your team’s ability to ensure fairness throughout the rest of the agency.

To learn how CMTS:HR can help you ensure that your processes are consistently followed for each investigation, call us at 855-636-5361 or email us at Team_CMTSHR@CMTSHR.com.