TL;DR: Deb Muller interviews Greg Hutchinson about trauma-informed investigation practices. Greg explains that these practices ensure physical, psychological and emotional safety for all participants, should be applied as a default in every interaction, begin before interviews and are grounded in five core principles: Safety, control, choice, collaboration and empowerment.
Three Key Takeaways from the Video: Trauma-Informed Investigation Practices
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Trauma-informed is for everyone: Not just people with overt or “big” trauma; it should be the default approach in all workplace investigations.
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It starts early: The process begins with the first communication, so tone, timing and language matter as much as the interview itself.
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Five principles drive trust: Safety, control, choice, collaboration and empowerment create a respectful and effective investigative process.
Video Transcript: Trauma-Informed Investigation Practices
Deb Muller:
00:00:12.360
Hi everybody, it’s Deb Muller. I’m here for another Two Minute Matters and I am joined by today’s guest star Greg Hutchinson. Greg is a partner at Hut Barker Hutchinson and Associates and they do workplace investigations, so not a big surprise that we’re having him here today. So nice to see you Greg.
Greg Hutchinson:
00:00:30.359
Thanks so much for having me.
Deb Muller:
00:00:32.238
Yeah, so Greg, recently — it was a while ago, our schedules have been a little crazy — but you wrote a great post on LinkedIn that caught my eye and it was about trauma-informed investigation practices. And I thought, oh, I think our community needs to hear more. So I’d love for you to spend two minutes sharing what trauma-informed investigation practices are, and really how should we be using them? What are some best practices for incorporating them into what we’re doing in our workplaces? So with that, you know the rules — I’m going to give you two minutes. I’m going to get my timer.
Greg Hutchinson:
00:01:06.760
Perfect. Um, well, I’m glad. It’s a really good question and a very good topic and one that I think is growing increasingly important for workplace investigations and HR professionals. Um, trauma-informed practice — I think what is that? It’s really interacting in a way that, you know, it emphasizes physical, psychological and emotional safety for all of the participants in the investigation, and we’re really trying to create opportunities where trauma survivors can hopefully rebuild at least some sense of control and empowerment over the process.
I think there’s kind of three things that I would really try to highlight when, you know, your audience is thinking about using trauma-informed practices. And the first is that we really want to eliminate the notion that it is only overtly traumatic or big experiences that need to be handled through a trauma-informed approach. You know, we should really be trying to apply trauma-informed principles to every interview and every interaction that we have. It should really be used as our default. Trauma is often subtle, it can be a series of subtle events. We don’t know someone’s lived experience. We don’t know how the events in their life have shaped them and how that might cause them to respond during an interview. And so whether we are interacting with a complainant, a witness or a respondent — and really no matter the nature of the allegations against the respondent — we really want to try to treat everyone with the same degree of respect and empathy.
The second thing I would emphasize is that trauma-informed practices really begin long before the interview. They begin as soon as we start to communicate with the different participants. Every interaction, every communication that we have with a participant has the potential to be triggering to some degree. And so we really need to carefully consider both when we’re communicating and also how we’re communicating with each participant. We want to be really mindful of the tone that we’re using, the language in our communications. The tone that I always try to use is what I call being warmly neutral, and that’s in both written communications and in our verbal communications. In our interviews, we really are trying to be objective but also respectful and empathetic.
The last thing I think I would try to highlight is to really incorporate the five trauma-informed principles into all of our interactions. So: safety — we want it to be a safe space for the participants to share their experience; control — we want to be able to provide a sense of control over the process, maybe that’s with respect to communication preferences; choice — we want them to have some choice in how the interview process unfolds, when and how it occurs; and once we start to offer choice and control, we’re also making the process collaborative. And when we can then offer safety, control, give some degree of choice and collaboration, we’re hopefully also adding some empowerment back into that process and hopefully returning at least a small degree of control that was stripped away through their experience.
Deb Muller:
00:04:27.520
That is so interesting, and we are of course out of time, but maybe we’ll do a whole session on it. I’d love to hear from our audience, from our community. You know, is this a new practice to you? How have you been using it? What’s worked? What doesn’t? I have to believe that this really helps to engender trust in the process, which is so important. I loved your point about it not having to be a big trauma — like trauma shows up differently in different people, so different experiences. So thank you so much. I think the conversation is going to continue on this. We’ll have to have you back. But what do you think a fortunate community want to learn more? Have you had experience in it? Let us know. So thanks again, Greg, and we’ll see everybody soon.
Greg Hutchinson:
00:05:08.600
Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure.
