Expert Answers To Your Top 6 Employee Complaint Handling Questions

Reports, complaints, grievances. Whatever you call them, they can be stressful for an HR leader, but are also an essential source for uncovering misconduct and compliance lapses in your organization. You can’t be everywhere at once, so getting employees to report incidents and concerns is key to maintaining an ethical workplace culture.

However, how to handle these reports isn’t always clear. Luckily, HR consultant and author Sharlyn Lauby has answered common questions to ensure you address these concerns quickly and effectively to reduce risk.

1. Is every concern a “formal concern?”

Lauby’s short answer: no. “Sometimes people will, you know, mention a concern or they’ll come to me and say something and they just don’t understand the process. . . This is an opportunity for me to educate them about the process and they understand and an investigation does not happen.” This might happen if an employee is complaining about a minor issue (i.e. coworker’s smelly lunches or loud talking) that should be handled interpersonally, not by HR.

“However,” Lauby continues, “there are times when people will come and they will vent and they will say thank you very much, don’t tell anybody, but unfortunately what they’ve shared with me is a concern. There’s something there that needs to be investigated and I do have to stop them and say, ‘I appreciate the fact that you did this, but I have to investigate it.’” If this takes the employee by surprise, Lauby suggests that you “loop in your legal team to make sure that that gets handled in an appropriate manner.”

RELATED: How to Decide When to Investigate an Employee Complaint

2. Is corrective action always necessary after a complaint?

After receiving a report, you should first triage it and then, if necessary, investigate it. After the investigation, you should take multiple factors into account when deciding on next steps.

The first thing to consider is “the severity of the situation,” Lauby says. Whether it’s the first offense or the 100th, something like sexual assault requires corrective action while something like small office supply theft might not.

She also suggests asking, “Are we considering corrective action for someone who has a disciplinary record? Have we been in this situation before and what did we do back then?” Staying consistent with past incidents helps you close investigations faster and reduces the risk of a wrongful discipline suit from the accused.

Finally, “we also have to think about any other mitigating circumstances that we need to consider,” she says. “There are other people besides the people who are actively a part of the investigation that we need to talk to,” such as witnesses and the complainant’s and the accused person’s managers.

3. How quickly should we respond to a concern?

Lauby suggests that the size of your team could dictate this, as smaller teams simply might not have the capacity to respond to complaints right away. “But the other thing is, how does your business operate? If I operate in a 365/24/7 business, then it’s kind of hard for me to say that I need a long time to respond.”

One way to improve your response time is by “using a call-in service so that [employees] can get an initial connection.” Case IQ is now partnered with WhistleBlower Security to offer an easy-to-use reporting hotline that integrates with your case management platform, so employees can report any time, and complaints are automatically filed in your case queue to reduce response time.

RELATED: What to Look for in a Complaint Management System

4. If our organization wants to be more proactive, can we?

“A more proactive approach is a way to move the needle in the right direction,” toward a more ethical culture, Lauby says. “So instead of being reactive and just hearing about complaints all the time, we can fix this and we can move forward and spend our time on other things,” such as studying case data to learn where to focus your preventive efforts

“We want to make sure that what we’re doing is defensible. If we ever have to explain why we did what we did then we want to be in a position that we can do that,” she says. “After we gather all the information, and some of this is going to be driven by the nature of the concern, but as we get all that information together, we’ll look at our findings and then we’ll develop our recommendations.”

Case IQ makes this easy with our award-winning BI tools. You can create graphs, charts, and heat maps showing trends in your complaints and investigations with just a few clicks, so you can spend less time on analysis and more on taking preventive actions.

5. Can we use external help to investigate complaints?

Lauby notes that any size team can benefit from external investigators or experts for employee investigations. They can ease a large workload or help out small teams, as well as provide case-specific insight for issues such as data theft or discrimination.

Collaborators are helpful “not just in terms of time, but sometimes employees will view an external investigator as being impartial to everything that’s happening,” says Lauby. This is especially true for cases involving C-suite executives or employees with long tenure, as internal team members might feel uncomfortable or fearful investigating them.

6. How can we use employee complaints as teaching tools?

“Depending upon the nature of [the] investigation, we might be in a place where we can take this situation and sanitize it and use it in training or refreshers,” Lauby says. “But obviously we have to protect the people involved in this situation, but can we use it as some creative inspiration to design more realistic examples and that becomes a benefit to the organization.”

In other words, rather than relying on high-level rules or made-up examples for your employee training modules, use real-life complaints you’ve received (with key details changed) as inspiration for exercises or quizzes. Employees should find them more engaging, easy-to-understand, and relevant to your specific industry and organization since they really happened.

How Case IQ Can Help

Case IQ’s modern case management software provides all the tools you need to uncover, investigate, manage, and prevent workplace incidents in one centralized, secure platform. Our integrated whistleblower hotline empowers employees to report concerns and ensures you never miss a complaint. Learn more here.

Important: This post is for informational and educational purposes only. This post should not be taken as legal advice or used as a substitute for such. You should always speak to your own lawyer.