How to assess if an employee complaint warrants a formal investigation or not

As psychosocial risk obligations tighten and AI makes it easier for employees to draft legalistic complaints, many employers are defaulting to full investigations for everything that lands on their desk. Two workplace investigation experts suggest what to do instead.

Ask most HR practitioners what happens when a complaint arrives, and the honest answer is often, “It goes straight to investigation”. 

But according to Jodie Fox and Jason Clark, Directors at workplace investigations firm Worklogic, that instinct is increasingly the wrong one – and it can do more harm than the original complaint.

“Sometimes there’s that overcorrection into thinking [you] need to investigate every single complaint that comes through various complaint mechanisms,” says Fox. 

Fear of a psychosocial risk claim, for example, might spur employers to immediately jump to the farthest end of the spectrum, treating every complaint a serious complaint that warrants formal investigation.

However, often that reflex isn’t really about risk management at all – it’s about resourcing, says Fox.

Understaffed or time-poor teams frequently lack the time to properly understand the nature of the complaint, she says, which can result in “an automatic rubber stamping to go to investigation”.

Clark agrees, and points to a broader misunderstanding of available tools.

“The investigation process is just one risk management tool in the whole kit bag of risk management tools available to them,” he says. 

Sometimes, employers forget about things like preliminary assessments or alternative dispute resolution.

“In some scenarios, a workplace investigation… is the worst possible way to address [an issue],” he says, as it can erode trust rather than repair it.

The AI factor complicating triage

Both Fox and Clark are increasingly seeing complaints arrive dressed in legal language, more than likely drafted with the help of AI. 

“We’re often getting complaints that very much appear that they’ve been written with the assistance of AI, and are threatening general protections orders or stop bullying orders,” says Fox. 

Part of the problem, she explains, is that generative AI tends to validate rather than challenge the end user.

“You’re not getting a lot of critical feedback from [platforms like] ChatGPT. People often think they have a [valid] complaint that’s confirmed by [AI], and so they become quite cemented into their position.”

Importantly, this doesn’t mean the underlying complaint lacks substance, but it does mean HR needs to look past the packaging. 

“We have to be a little bit more critical about what we’re reading, and not accept it on face value because it could have been written by a robot,” says Clark.

A test for deciding whether to investigate

This need for discernment goes beyond assessing whether AI has been used to create a workplace complaint; Fox and Clark both agree that HR and managers should first interrogate two questions:

1. Does it clear the policy threshold?

Would the alleged conduct, if proven at its highest, breach the organisation’s policies to a degree that would justify disciplinary action? 

That “proven at their height” framing matters. At this stage, HR isn’t yet testing whether the allegations are true, only whether, assuming they are, the conduct described would actually breach a policy seriously enough to warrant a disciplinary response.

If the answer is no – even taking the complaint entirely at face value – a formal investigation likely isn’t the right tool anyway, Clark and Fox say, despite whatever else might be going on.

Getting this right depends on managers and HR having a shared, well-understood picture of where the line actually sits. 

Fox describes this as fundamentally a training issue: managers need “an understanding of the behaviours at work that are going to breach our policy… where’s the line that we’re looking at.” 

Without that shared standard, triage becomes inconsistent – the same complaint might be waved through by one manager and escalated by another, purely because no one has clearly defined what does and doesn’t meet the threshold.

As Clark puts it, even after allegations are properly particularised, the organisation still needs to ask itself: if these were substantiated, “What are you going to do with it?” If the answer doesn’t point to disciplinary action – because the conduct described, even at its worst, doesn’t reach a breach of the code of conduct or policy – then Clark questions whether the investigation is this the best approach.

Alternative avenues, such as mediation, may be more appropriate, he says.

“A workplace investigation is one tool. It’s not the only tool, and if you use it as the only tool, that can be quite damaging to the [culture],” says Fox.

2. Is there evidence to support it?

Once the complainant has been interviewed, the next question to ask is: ‘Is there enough detail to put specific allegations to a respondent fairly?’

Broad assertions like: “My boss is always having a go at me,” “I’m being gaslit,” “I’m being micromanaged” – aren’t enough on their own, says Fox. A skilled investigator needs to test them and surface evidence, she says.

“So that’s saying, ‘Explain to me what you mean by gaslit… give me an example. When was the last time this happened? From the beginning, what happened?'”

Importantly, a lack of evidence doesn’t automatically mean the complaint is untrue. Clark notes that complainants who’ve experienced sustained, low-level misconduct often struggle to isolate specific dates, particularly where the behaviour has been occurring over a period of years.

But without particularised evidence, Fox warns that “running an investigation… won’t be procedurally fair,” and even if it proceeds, “you’re probably unlikely to get the findings… to lead to disciplinary action.”

Clark flags one especially costly mistake: suspending a respondent before this triage happens at all.

He describes examples where employers “kicked the switch over very quickly into an investigation” and suspended a respondent on pay before properly interviewing the complainant, only for experts to determine the matter couldn’t be reasonably investigated.

“They’ve sewn a rod in their own back and created a new problem when it didn’t need to exist,” he says, and there’s now genuine psychosocial risk now sitting with a respondent who was stood down unnecessarily.

“A workplace investigation is one tool. It’s not the only tool, and if you use it as the only tool, that can be quite damaging to the [culture].” – Jodie Fox, Director, Worklogic

The preliminary assessment: a middle path

Where the picture isn’t clear-cut, Fox points to the preliminary assessment as a practical middle option. It mirrors the first stage of a formal investigation – reviewing documentation, speaking to the complainant and drafting the allegations – without committing to the full process. 

That creates a genuine decision point. Return to that critical opening question: “If these are proven at their height, what are we going to do about it?” 

If the answer involves disciplinary action, a full investigation is likely warranted, says Fox. If it points to mediation, coaching or resetting expectations instead, Fox says “there’s a good case to [skip] that full investigation… it’s often a much more efficient, much less damaging approach.”

What often surfaces through this process isn’t misconduct at all, but systemic issues – unclear allocation of work and role ambiguity are recurring themes – which call for organisational fixes rather than a formal process against an individual, they add.

How to communicate a decision not to investigate

Choosing not to run a formal investigation doesn’t mean going quiet on the complainant. They still need to feel heard and supported. However, it’s important that HR and managers are clear about who ultimately owns the decision to investigate or not.

“The organisation owns the process,” says Clark. “The complainant does not own the process of how it’s managed.”

Ownership, however, should sit alongside collaboration. Fox recommends offering complainants a graduated set of options: a direct conversation between the parties, a facilitated conversation, manager-led coaching or a team-wide reset of expectations. 

“The more direct and local the solution is, the more robust and lasting the response and resolution is,” she says.

Importantly, Clark suggests being mindful of the language you choose to use in these conversations.

“The complainant is going to be tuning into the wording that’s being used when they’re being given that feedback [about their complaint],” he says. “Saying ‘the organisation is taking this complaint seriously’ does not necessarily mean the complaint is of a serious nature that warrants an investigation, but we are still taking it seriously nonetheless. 

“You’ve got to be very careful about how it is interpreted by the complainant. You don’t want them walking out of the room going, ‘They don’t think that the complaint’s serious enough.’ So then… they either go and find more evidence which might be valid, or they add another complaint to it.

“We want to make it known that, yes, the organisation takes these things seriously, but we do have a grab bag of options available to us to deal with it.”

Fox suggests giving complainants genuine, factual information about how workplace processes work, noting most people’s only real reference point is “TV criminal law”, which is a poor guide to the toolkit HR actually has at its disposal.

Build the capability in managers, not just HR

Both Fox and Clark say the underlying fix is manager capability, so fewer complaints escalate to HR in the first place. 

Clark recalls coaching a manager whose approach was “if it’s not in writing, it’s not a complaint” – language he describes as “completely inappropriate”. 

Fox says coaching for curiosity as a skill set in managers is important.

“Sitting down with someone with an open mind, asking a lot of questions and being curious about what’s going on here is a very valuable conversation to be having.”

Get the triage right, and in many cases, you may not need one at all.

🧰 HR’s career resource toolkit

• Learning: Investigating workplace misconduct course
• Learning: Writing allegation and investigation reports
• Read: Step inside a psychosocial risk investigation 
• Read: Are your workplace investigation processes exposing you to WHS prosecution risk?

This article is based on information provided by Jodie Fox and Jason Clark, Directors at Worklogic. The contents of this article do not constitute legal advice and should not be relied upon as such.