At some point in time an employer may have to figure out what to do when faced with a hostile terminations problem, or even hostile threats in the workplace. There may come a time when an employee accuses another co employee of verbal and hostile non verbal conduct and as head of the company you will need to take some kind of action to protect employees and ensure work security.
Acknowledge the Complaint
The first thing you need to do is acknowledge that there is a problem. You cannot ignore a complaint about a threat that is given to one of your employees. You should immediately investigate the problem, because if you leave it alone, you could end up with a tragedy on your hands.
Start Investigating
As an employer you need to start some sort of investigation and find out whether the reported threat or hostile behavior, or hostile termination is credible, then you need to decide on an action to be taken by the company. Whoever you do get to help with the investigation needs to be familiar with employment law and should be able to conduct a professional inquiry to get all the factual information.
Protection
At this time you need to decide on whether you need to suspend the employee who has the complaint made against him. It really depends on what the offense was. Was it just a hostile termination of another employee or was it actually a physical threat against someone.
Should You Involve the Police?
If you find that there is a credible threat or that the hostile terminations accusation is credible then you may want to involve the police authorities. It really depends on what the threat to the company was.
The Results of Your Investigation
Often the best recourse is to hire a professional investigative service like that of Nickels private investigations. This way you can stand back and find out if the threat is real or not. If the investigation should find that there is credible information and threatening behavior, then you should be ready to take some sort of action like:
• Issuing a verbal warning • Issuing a written warning • A suspension • Termination • Compensation for a wrongful termination
An investigative company like Nickels private investigations will offer documented information which should be preserved in case of any type of litigation.
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