HR Question, Does the reporter have to give details?

In My Humble Opinion
1

This took place a while ago and has since, more or less, resolved itself so I’m going to leave most of the details out of it, but it still bothers me.

First of all, let me start by saying that my company has 10-20 employees and no HR department. When an employee has an issue they talk to someone (me, the owner, one of the other managers) and we deal with it, but this issue was a bit different. Also, if it makes a difference, most of my employees are 15-25, so they don’t always know what to do when there’s a problem.

In short, one of my employees said that she was having a problem with a co-worker. That was, literally, the only thing she would tell us. I wasn’t there for the conversation but the owner said she just kept saying over and over that she had a problem with her co-worker and that was it, no further details. He tried to dig for information saying that he can’t fire the other person with nothing to go on and he can’t tell him to knock it off if he doesn’t know what the problem is. For the record, he [the owner] did talk to the other person and he said that he also had no idea what she might have been talking about. But he still wanted to say something just so that, even if he wanted to deny it, he still knows that something was said and he can alter his behavior, if it was a legit complaint.

What this really boils down to is, am I compelled to do something when an employee says “I want to lodge a complaint against [co-worker] but I won’t tell you why”? And secondly, can I compel the employee to either tell me what the problem is or drop the issue. My gut feeling is that if they have a problem, but refuse to tell you what it is, well, for starters there’s nothing I can do and besides that, I feel it’s fair of me to call it baseless and leave it alone.

This is something that makes me think I should get written complaint forms for employees to fill out. That way there’s a paper trail. Look at a case like this. Let’s say this employee really did do something nasty, maybe sexually charged. If he did it again and the first employee came forward and said “I complained about it last year and they refused to discipline him” I can pull out the written complaint and and show that while she did say there was a problem, she didn’t say what it was, so there wasn’t anything I could do to fix the problem.

To look at it differently, I can call the police and tell them someone did something illegal and needs to be arrested, but if I refuse any details beyond that, nothing is going to become of it.

The issue is, as I’m sure you can guess: If he called her up at 10 at night and said ‘you have a really nice rack, you should wear something low cut tomorrow’ clearly, we’d have to fire him. If her problem was that “I heard he’s [religion] and I’m [different religion]” well, maybe that’s more her problem than his. And there’s a whole world in between them. But we had nothing to go on. (made up examples, don’t get hung up or pick them apart.

This is one of those things that makes me consider taking an HR 101 class just to get a better grasp on how do deal with them going forward, but in general the owner is pretty good at dealing with people (customers, vendors, employees etc).

*To be fair to the other employee, in a few years of him working there, one other person did say something about him and when we confronted him about it, before even giving him the details, he, without hesitation, said ‘you’re right, I stepped over the line’, so I feel that if he knew what the problem was, he would have copped to it. His only guess was that she was retaliating for him being angry at her the night before for slacking off at work (she was quite the slacker). I have some other theories, but they’re not really relevant to the question at hand.

2

Of course she has to give details. If she is unwilling to provide details you can’t address the issue. You could offer her someone else to provide details to, if perhaps the issue is she is uncomfortable discussing it with a male supervisor.

HR response ‘Based on the details provided and interviewing the concerned parties we have found no evidence of wrong doing’

From a management perspective this women is wasting your time, I’d be looking to get rid of her.

3

Her first “report” was to a female manager (via text message). If we did get written forms, I like the idea of “Based on the details provided we found no evidence of wrong doing”, maybe changing it to “based on lack of details reported” or “employee refused to give any details” etc.

This is a slightly hypothetical situation because, for reasons I care not to get into, some people think she may have been ‘coached’ to report him so that we’d fire him. While it seemed plausible, the people that we thought may have been coaching her probably could have just lobbied to fire him (and, in fact, had the authority to fire him on their own just for fun (at will state and all that). It’s such a small workplace that when someone (in management) starts whining about another employee on a regular basis, things tend to go downhill very quickly for that person.

Looking at some online complaint form templates, they all ask the person to describe the specific incident (naturally). I suppose, if someone refused to fill that in, we could note that nothing was done because the employee refused to fill it in and just file it away. It’s still good, IMO, to keep it on file because it might turn ‘hmmm, someone said John hit on her’ to ‘hey this is the second time a complaint was made against him, we don’t know what the first one was about, but it’s still two complaints in one year’.
OTOH, if the person that files the complaint leave it blank, maybe it shouldn’t even be considered. Just to make sure people don’t file complaints just to file them (for, let’s say “false” reasons or retaliation) and not have to worry about it coming back to haunt them since there’s really nothing to it. If you want to make a complaint, if you want to say something that could get someone fired, be prepared to stand behind it. I know it’s hard, but that’s life.

My workplace, like I said, mostly employees teens, so they do tend to learn a lot of life lessons here. It’s usually their first ‘real’ job and the first time they learn that life’s not fair.

4

If an employee will not give a hint of what the problem is there is nothing you can do. I would make a write up of what you asked her and what her answers were. Take notes while talking with her. Keep this information incase she files a complaint about you the employer doing nothing.
I know what my union would do if a member brought this kind of no information complaint about another employee. They would ask for detailed information and if given no information they would advise the member to stop or a complain could filed against the complainer.

5

I agree with the above. Document everything and put it in the employee’s personnel file. Then you are covered.

And nothing you can do if the person will not say what happened.

6

Agree.

7

Another HR person chiming in.

With such a nebulous complaint, and an employee refusing to specify what her issue is with the individual she is complaining about, there was nothing you could or should do over and above what you actually did. You took her complaint seriously, made a good faith, thorough, attempt to investigate, and being unable to find anything actionable, you closed it. As long as you keep notes on file detailing your efforts to investigate, you have done everything you are obligated to do - both ethically and legally.

8

It sounds to me like you need a process. It’s less important what that process is- you just need a uniform way of documenting, processing and coming to decisions on complaints. This should be laid out ahead of time, explained in training and implemented consistently.

Managing things on a case-by-case basis, where different people may get treated differently, is just asking for trouble.