Rethinking workplace investigations: A trauma-informed approach for employers

What employers need to know:

Adapting a trauma-informed approach to workplace investigations can greatly reduce harm, improve legal compliance, and lead to more accurate outcomes. By prioritising employees’ safety, trust, and fairness, organisations foster a culture of respect and accountability – ultimately strengthening employee engagement and reducing psychosocial risk.

For decades, the model for workplace investigations has centred around the proof of guilt or innocence, and was framed around an adversarial approach to fact finding. While based on fundamental principles of procedural fairness, this approach may leave a trail of damage. Some complainants report feeling interrogated, witnesses may feel intimidated by the process, and respondents allege that they feel ambushed.

As experience has demonstrated, even a legally fair process can be traumatising, giving rise to a real risk that workplace investigations become a source of secondary harm.

Far from being "soft" or diluting rigor, trauma-informed workplace investigation processes not only seek to minimise the risk of harm to investigation participants, but also seek to achieve more robust and fairer outcomes. In this article, we explain why trauma is relevant to the workplace and the principles of trauma-informed practice. In later articles, we explain how the principles of trauma-informed practice are applied to workplace investigations.

What is Trauma and why is it relevant to the workplace?

Trauma is the emotional, psychological, and physiological response to a distressing event or series of events, which overwhelms an individual's ability to cope.¹   When we hear the word "trauma," our minds often leap to a major accident, a physical assault, or a natural disaster. These are undoubtedly significant sources of trauma. However, a trauma-informed lens also recognises that the impact of events that are emotionally distressing can, through repetition or context, accumulate to cause significant and ongoing harm. Workplace bullying, sustained harassment, and other distressing or humiliating events in the workplace can all be sources of trauma.

Trauma is also relevant to the workplace because individuals may come to the workplace having suffered trauma. This means that a trauma-informed approach is not a niche consideration for a handful of difficult cases. It has the potential for universal application, creating a process that is fair and safe for everyone.

A person who has suffered trauma, as a matter of ordinary human experience, undergoes a heightened physiological response to perceived threats. This explains why, in an interview, a person might "freeze" and be unable to answer a question, might recall events in a fragmented, non-chronological order, or might have crystal-clear memory of a sensory detail (like the smell of a colleague's perfume) but be unable to recall the exact words spoken. A traditional investigation often misinterprets these trauma responses as signs of deception or unreliability. A trauma-informed approach to workplace investigations understands them as potentially being explained by trauma, without necessarily drawing adverse inferences about the individual’s credibility or their evidence.

The foundational principles of trauma-informed practice

The widely recognised framework from the United States Government’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) provides six interconnected principles that form the foundation of trauma-informed practice:²

The case for a trauma-informed approach

The legal landscape has fundamentally shifted. In Australia, for example, work health and safety legislation now explicitly imposes a "positive duty" on employers to proactively ensure the psychological health of their workers. Incidents like bullying and harassment are not just interpersonal issues; they are classified as "psychosocial hazards”. Conducting an investigation in a way that is re-traumatising can be a breach of the law that exposes the organisation to significant liability.

Furthermore, a procedurally unfair process is highly vulnerable to successful challenge in the Fair Work Commission, if the termination of employment was a disciplinary outcome.

Ultimately, the business case for trauma-informed practice is premised on the dignity of the person (even when they are the respondent to the investigation) and the way in which the process fortifies perceptions of trust in the organisation to act fairly. This fosters a culture where people are more willing to report issues early, allowing the organisation to intervene before issues escalate into costly disputes. This translates into higher employee engagement, reduced turnover, and lower rates of absenteeism and presenteeism.

Ultimately, it can also yield better, more accurate investigation outcomes, by facilitating the disclosure of wrongdoing, by allowing investigators to gather more complete and reliable information, and by leading to findings that are more robust, defensible and just.

Finally, it speaks to the very values of an organisation. A workplace investigation can be one of the most stressful and vulnerable experiences of an employee's career. By treating employees with compassion, an organisation demonstrates its commitment to the inherent dignity of its workers.

In the next article, we discuss how each principle moves from theory into practice.