Your Investigators Should Not Be Adjusting Thermostats
Global Tech Company
At a Glance
The investigation team at a global technology company was drowning, but not in the way you might expect. The majority of their caseload was not high-risk misconduct or fraud. It was office temperature complaints, parking disputes, and questions about the snack policy. Legitimate concerns, perhaps, but not the kind of work that required trained investigators earning senior salaries.
During a headcount freeze, the team could not hire additional staff to manage the volume. Every hour spent on a thermostat complaint was an hour not spent on the retaliation allegation, the conflict of interest investigation, or the financial irregularity that actually required investigative expertise.
The company built an automated workflow within Ethico that categorized incoming reports at the point of intake and routed them based on severity. Reports categorized as low-severity, facilities complaints, general HR questions, and workplace environment concerns, were automatically routed to local office managers with a pre-built "Self-Resolution" email template and a set of suggested actions.
The workflow bypassed the investigations team entirely for these categories. Local managers received the report, took action, and documented the resolution, all without an investigator ever touching the case. The system maintained a record of every auto-routed case for audit purposes, ensuring nothing fell through the cracks.
The investigations team recovered 40% of their working hours, time that had been consumed by cases that never required their expertise. The impact on case quality was immediate: average time-to-close for high-risk investigations dropped because investigators were no longer context-switching between serious cases and office complaints.
Local office managers, initially uncertain about their new role in the process, found that the pre-built templates and suggested actions made resolution straightforward. Most low-severity cases were closed within 24 hours, far faster than they had been when they sat in the investigations queue waiting for triage.
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