Workplace Investigation Failures: The Biggest Mistakes You Can Make

EV Key Takeaways | Workplace Investigation Failures: The Biggest Mistakes You Can Make

A flawed investigation doesn't just fail to resolve misconduct, it creates new legal exposure, destroys employee trust, and undermines the very compliance culture you've spent years building.

When done well, investigations reinforce speak-up culture, deliver fair outcomes, and protect organizations from legal and reputational harm. When done poorly, they erode employee trust, create discoverable liability, and signal to the workforce that compliance is something to fear rather than rely on. In this Ethicsverse session, moderator Matt Kelly led a candid conversation with Jake Sullivan (Karl Storz), Carolina de Luna Ponce (Aleatica), Kevin Brenner (Global Link Law), and Nick Gallo (Ethico) on the most common — and most dangerous — mistakes made in internal investigations, and what compliance, ethics, and HR professionals can do to avoid them.

Create a Positive Investigation Experience from the First Interaction

The majority of employees interviewed during an investigation will remain employed at the company long after it concludes, making the quality of their experience a direct investment in long-term workforce trust.
Building rapport, clearly stating the purpose of the interview, and asking open-ended questions rather than leading or "gotcha" ones protects the organization's reputation and reinforces compliance as a business-enabling function.
When investigators fail to provide a clear, respectful experience, confusion and anxiety spread through the workforce, damaging the credibility of the compliance program in ways that are difficult to repair.

Recognize and Combat Motivated Reasoning

Motivated reasoning — the unconscious tendency to process information in ways that confirm a predetermined conclusion — is one of the most dangerous and underacknowledged pitfalls in internal investigations.
When investigators enter a case believing they already know the answer, the process shifts from genuine fact-finding to the selective gathering of corroborating evidence, leaving systemic issues unexamined and legitimate findings on the table.
Compliance teams must actively build safeguards against this cognitive bias through structured deliberation, peer review, and a culture that rewards intellectual honesty over the appearance of efficiency.

Structure Your Investigation Function Like a Business Process

Internal investigations should be treated as a repeatable, quality-controlled business process — not improvised case by case based on individual investigator judgment.
Standardization across intake, triage, interview protocols, documentation requirements, and case closure criteria ensures consistent output quality and reduces the variance that creates legal and reputational risk.
Just as a manufacturing process measures quality by low deviation from expected outcomes, an investigations function should apply the same logic: consistent inputs, consistent standards, and consistent outputs across every matter regardless of who is conducting the investigation.

Assign Investigations to Competent, Appropriately Resourced Investigators

One of the most dangerous mistakes an organization can make is assigning an investigation to someone solely because they work in compliance, without confirming they have the relevant training, experience, and bandwidth to handle the matter.
Managing 20 to 30 simultaneous investigations — a reality for many compliance leaders — demands rigorous triage, clear prioritization, and honest assessment of when external support or dedicated investigation resources are needed.
Investigator competence is not merely a process variable; it is the foundation on which every other element of a sound investigation depends, and gaps in that competence can compromise outcomes in ways that are difficult or impossible to remedy after the fact.

Implement Litigation Holds Early and Err on the Side of Caution

Litigation holds should be issued at the earliest reasonable indication that an investigation could result in regulatory scrutiny or litigation — and when in doubt, earlier is always safer than later.
Issuing a hold prematurely carries minimal organizational risk, while issuing one too late can result in spoliation findings, destroyed evidence, and serious legal consequences that far outweigh the inconvenience of acting cautiously.
Organizations should ensure their litigation hold process is clearly defined, operationally efficient, and paired with proactive communication to hold recipients to minimize inadvertent confidentiality breaches.

Protect Privilege — and Know When to Loop In Legal

Not every investigation requires attorney oversight from the outset, but failing to involve legal counsel at the right moment can permanently compromise privilege over information that later proves critical.
Organizations that begin an investigation without attorney-client privilege and only bring in legal after uncovering serious issues face a compounded problem: a discoverable record already exists, and all communications generated up to that point may be exposed.
Investigators must be trained to recognize the signals that warrant escalation to legal, and organizations should have clear protocols defining under what circumstances privilege should be established before interviews begin.

Treat Confidentiality as a Dynamic Risk to Be Managed, Not a Static Promise

True confidentiality in an internal investigation is never absolute — investigators have reporting obligations, witnesses talk, and the more complex the investigation, the more people are inevitably involved.
Rather than treating confidentiality as a binary commitment, compliance professionals should be candid with interview subjects about what can and cannot be protected and build operational discipline around who knows what and when.
When an investigation becomes widely known within the organization, compliance leaders must adapt their approach — often in collaboration with HR, legal, and people and culture teams — to protect the integrity of the process under heightened scrutiny.

Don't Separate Employees Prematurely — Build a Disciplined Process for That Decision

One of the most consequential and easily avoidable investigation mistakes is premature employee separation, often driven by business unit leaders who want to demonstrate decisive action before a proper investigation has been completed.
Firing an employee before conducting appropriate interviews can create a potential whistleblower, foreclose future cooperation, and introduce legal liability that far outweighs the optics of a swift response.
Organizations should establish disciplinary guidelines that allow for structured flexibility — ensuring consistency across similar cases while accounting for the nuanced considerations that make each separation decision legally defensible.

Use Investigation Review Committees to Align Compliance, Legal, and HR

A cross-functional investigation review committee — bringing together compliance, legal, HR, and relevant business stakeholders before any corrective action is finalized — introduces transparency, distributes accountability, and improves the consistency of disciplinary outcomes.
This model transforms what can otherwise feel like a top-down compliance mandate into a collaborative organizational decision, building buy-in and reducing the likelihood of later challenges to the fairness of the process.
When all parties have reviewed the evidence and participated in the outcome discussion, disciplinary decisions are more defensible, more consistently applied, and more likely to be understood as legitimate by the broader workforce.

Every Investigation Is a Performance of Your Compliance Culture

Each investigation is one of the most visible demonstrations of whether the values a compliance program claims to uphold are actually operational within the organization.
The way investigators treat witnesses, the transparency of the process, the consistency of disciplinary outcomes, and the follow-through on retaliation protections all send powerful signals to employees about whether speaking up is genuinely safe.
Organizations that recognize investigations as a point of cultural leverage — and design their processes accordingly — build the kind of trust that makes every future investigation easier to conduct and every future compliance initiative more likely to succeed.

Closing Summary

The throughline across this conversation is clear: the quality of an internal investigation is inseparable from the quality of the compliance function that conducts it. Practitioners who treat investigations as isolated procedural tasks — rather than as structured business processes embedded in a broader culture of transparency and trust — will continue to make the same costly mistakes. The path forward requires investment in investigator training, rigorous standardization, cross-functional collaboration, and an honest reckoning with the cognitive biases that can corrupt even well-intentioned fact-finding. When compliance teams get investigations right, they do more than resolve individual matters — they prove to the organization that ethics is not just a policy, but a practice.