This complete training tool includes:

• Two DVDs containing over 4½ hours of expertly researched and professionally produced investigation instructions
• A CD-ROM containing investigation forms, checklists, and documents you can customize to match your corporate standards
• A companion guidebook that leads you through the video presentation step-by-step and serves as a valuable ongoing reference

This DVD-based training system delivers step-by-step instructions that walk you through each phase of the workplace investigation, from taking the complaint to bringing the investigation to a close. You get clear guidance for avoiding complaints of disparate treatment, retaliation, or worse. Plus proven techniques for deftly managing the subjects of your investigation: the complainant, witnesses, in-house counsel and senior management.

Module One — Manage the Initial Complaint with Confidence and Competence
1 hour 15 minutes
♦ Documenting the complaint, including where and when to interview the complainant
♦ How to make the environment and the complainant comfortable
♦ Communicating your policy regarding complaints
♦ Disclose any mandatory reporting obligations
♦ Communicate your retaliation policy
♦ Question formation strategies that yield the best results
♦ Secrets to keeping an open mind
♦ Summarization or active listening
♦ Note-taking essentials
♦ Establishing desired outcome without making promises
♦ Initial discovery of evidence and proof
♦ Finding additional witnesses
♦ Documenting the interview and compiling witness statements
♦ Establishing the legal issues and calculating exposure
♦ Protecting the complainant

Module Two – Choose the Right Investigator For the Job
14 minutes
♦ Finding someone organized, objective, impartial, credible, and with a working knowledge of what it takes to meet the legal standard for avoiding liability
♦ When to go outside the organization for an investigator

Module Three – Keep Control of Documentation Challenges
23 minutes
♦ Definition – proof or evidence, doesn’t matter what it’s on
♦ Examples of formal documents
♦ Selecting colleagues to handle documentation
♦ Storage and filing rules for documentation
♦ Establishing a master list of necessary documents
♦ Using the provided document management template

Module Four – Interview Witnesses to Reveal the Truth
2 hours 40 minutes
♦ Confidentiality techniques to stop the rumor mill
♦ Crafting the interviewee list
♦ Choosing the order of the witnesses
♦ Crafting your interview outline
♦ Restricting investigation “scope creep”
♦ What to tell the interviewee about the scope of the investigation and how responses will be used
♦ Employee honesty obligations
♦ Reviewing the retaliation policy with each witness
♦ How to use acknowledgment statements and confidentiality agreements
♦ How to write initial interview questions, and follow-ups, that reveal the truth
♦ Creating and documenting a timeline of events in question
♦ Acquiring and including documented evidence
♦ Separating rumor and conjecture from fact
♦ Building a witness list
♦ How to communicate with the respondent
♦ Note-taking and retention essentials
♦ Threats, coercion, promised benefits and guaranteed results: tempting but problematic
♦ Confidentiality challenges and solutions
♦ How to disengage from a confrontational interview subject
♦ Turning notes into witness statements
♦ Using statements from uncooperative witnesses
♦ Maintaining control of the interview, statements, and investigation

Module Five – Prepare a Rock-Solid Final Report
26 minutes
♦ Creating your executive summary
♦ Essential report contents
♦ Creating report charts
Exercise – putting documents in chronological order
Exercise – writing a summary of witness statements
Exercise – summarizing record evidence
♦ Using the provided report templates

Module Six – Execute Your Post-Investigation Action Plan
27 minutes
♦ Sharing your report with other decision makers
♦ Reporting on your investigative procedure
♦ Weighing witness credibility and inconsistencies
♦ When to involve counsel
♦ Making your recommendations
♦ Creating and executing your action plan
♦ Discipline essentials
♦ Rules for communicating the results of the investigation to both complainant and respondent
♦ Setting up departmental transfers if called for
♦ Final investigation checklist

Investigations Guidebook For Step-by-Step Instruction
Internal Investigations: A Practical Training Course for HR also includes a easy-reading guidebook that follows the DVDs’ six modules and provides additional information and notes. It also includes an issue-spotting guide to identify investigation trouble spots, sample forms in print and on CD-ROM, and a sample case-file, already completed, so you’ll know when you’re done. It also delivers:
♦ Useful exercises that cement learning of the investigation’s most difficult steps, like gathering relevant documents and drafting an ironclad final report
♦ Additional resources, including checklists and sample report elements you’ll use conducting your own investigations to save time, uncertainty, and risk.

Unlike other training programs, the comprehensive kit is:

• Simple. For you and your staff. You get a complete turnkey training solution that combines direct guideance with re-enactments of common, highly plausible situations.
  
  
• Engaging. Professional actors depict reality-based scenarios from the workplace, not the unrealistic, wooden and often absurd vignettesseen elsewhere.
  
  
• Authoritative. Each scenario is followed by frank and easily understood commentary from workplace consultant, trainer, and attorney Candace Kollas.
  
  
• Cost-effective. Train as many HR staff members as you need to for one low price, then as needed as your operation expands and your management team changes. No per-user cost or expensive annual fee.
  
  
• Convenient. Conduct training as it fits your organization's schedule, not that of some busy consultant.