Employee Workplace Investigations

Investigating an Employee or ex-Employee inside or outside of a workplace can cause many
challenges for management. Who is responsible for conducting the investigation, the line manager,
HR or do you outsource the process to a trusted professional with the expertise to fulfil the need to
prove your suspicious, or obtain a conviction during any judicial process?

Workplace investigation can come in many different shapes and sizes for several different purposes
which may include but is not limited to, misconduct, harassment, moonlighting, bullying, discrimination
allegations, or even theft of corporate data or clientele.

Hiring a private investigator to conduct a workplace investigation can help ease any conflict of interest
and remove any emotional attachment to an individual during the investigative process.

Private workplace investigations using Open Source Intelligence Techniques – OSINT can be more
cost effective than surveillance alone. You don’t wish to alert your main suspect that you are on to
them. You need to proceed with caution, act normally, but gain the ‘evidence’ required on which to
base decisions to protect your business.

The circumstantial evidence may include an employee whom you believed to be a trusted member
of your staff, causing you frustration and sleepless nights, the feeling of a physical body blow. The
situation is taking too much headspace, further damaging your usual ability to make sound financial
business decisions which you would normally sail through daily, as part of managing your business.

Scenario 1:
The market in which your business operates has contracted and you need to reduce your head count
accordingly as the business can no longer sustain the number of roles. Unfortunately, a redundancy
process must be implemented.

Unbeknown to you, a senior member of staff sees an opportunity and works on mentoring/priming
those that will be leaving the business with access to highly sensitive information, whilst they
themselves remain in their senior position, allowing a foot in both camps. The mentoring likely
included how to set up a business in direct competition with minimal overheads. Customer lists,
contracts, pricing were all known to those involved, meaning they could hit the ground running at
their given start date.

You need a damage limitation strategy, one which includes concrete evidence showing the activities
of the current and ex employees. Fox Robinson Investigations can help with your workplace,
employee and ex employee investigations.