An interesting case today from Ontario, Canada, and it all comes down to this: When there is a concern with someone's behaviour, how you treat them while following up on that concern matters a great deal.
In this case, the judge found that the employee was not treated in an "honest, fair, and responsible manner". Some key highlights as to why that was:
➡ The employer failed to address several initial complaints which was taken as condoning the behaviour. Setting your leaders up with the tools to have difficult conversations is a great way to help avoid this (and we just so happen to teach you how do to that!)
➡ The employer fell into what we like to call the Perceived Bias Paradox, where the perception of bias is the same as actual bias from the perspective of those affected. The Perceived Bias Paradox means that even if the investigative firm maintains clear boundaries between client representation and incident investigation to address actual bias, the employee still feels the process is biased. This creates a psychologically unsafe environment, altering the employee's response, effectively making perceived bias equivalent to actual bias and undermines a fair process.
➡ The process lacked transparency and began before informing the employee of the concern - skipping right over the opportunity for her to tell her story, and going straight to analysis of the employees e-mail. Later, the Court found that even when the employee did share her story, rather than assessing those answers for credibility and making a decision based on the evidence, "an effort was made to intimidate [the employee] into changing her answers". Finally, the investigator seemed to ignore the "human being" element in this scenario, and did interviews in a non-private space where other employees could see and know what was going on. This totally ignores relational fairness, and you need to keep an eye on all dimensions of fairness (relational, substantive, and procedural) for a good process.
There's more to this case - including implied threats of liens on homes and more - so feel free to read the article below for more details. The end result is that the employee was awarded significant financial damages from the employer. We can speculate that the reputational damage to the employer which has a real cost too - imagine you are job seeking, and before applying you google the company name to find the below article. Are you still putting in that resume?
If the leaders of this organization were equipped to have those difficult conversations to address those complaints, hear the employees story, and respond to the situation appropriately when the FIRST complaint came in, this story might have a different (and better) ending. We teach leaders how to do this properly, and our intro rate of $485 is a lot cheaper than a lawsuit!
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