Thanks for sharing, Holly Ivins 

Given the number of ET decisions based on poor investigations, it would seem there is a demand for more support.

Hi Holly, yes this topic is of interest, resources for explaining to managers/senior leaders about why we have investigations and about the need to have "healthy questioning" about the overall situation and what contributed to it, rather than it be about feeding the narrative they want the investigator to "prove" who they wish to place the blame upon is "guilty". And for managers involved in conducting investigations alongside HR - some still need to be told that open questions are best, and "good cop/bad cop" is not really that effective actually.

Certainly training for workplace investigations is really important. Having done many investigations myself in the workplace and for clients I leave no stone unturned no matter how long it takes. In my experience if work place investigators lack independence, cut corners and don't follow up leads disclosed during investigation interviews there is a risk of an employment tribunal claim being lodged if an employee that is the subject of an investigation is dismissed and/or discriminated against ultimately.

Hi Holly,
There probably is a need for some more detailed resources for managers who haven't had to conduct an investigation before as the target audience, however ACAS already have resources in this area, and their code determines a lot of the detail so it would need to be carefully constructed.

There is probably a market for cheap train the trainer style resource options for smaller organisations/those with less training budget to train a group of investigators.

The resource formats I find most helpful are templates and FAQ documents. Not a big fan of videos, though I know that's a lot of people's preferences.

I agree. Strangely I wrote a training course for my organisation on this topic last week, so that I could train the senior team here on the principles and best practices. What would help in this kind of area is not training for the HR professional (as we tend to know what to do), but resources so that we can share that learning with others - so an outline training session and case studies, or a guidance pack to share with managers, that kind of thing.

What I find unhelpful (but understandable) on the current CIPD website is how much guidance is embedded in member-only areas, and not downloadable - which limits any sharing of information with the people we work with. I totally understand that having information that can be downloaded massively increases the risk of it being scraped by AI etc, so I'm not sure what the right answer is - but in terms of usability, those are the things that would most help me.

Hope that is helpful.

Nina

Thank you all for your feedback this is really helpful. We will take this away and plan some resources to meet the needs you have flagged. If anyone has any other feedback about the website content please let me know!