CA Effective Complaint and Investigation Requirements

In its workplace violence prevention law, California requires employers to have an effective complaint and investigation system.

Most importantly, they want employers to be notified that there's a problem so that you can correct and fix that problem.

And having an effective complaint and investigation process is a major component of being able to do that.

In this piece and companion video, we'll discuss what you can do to level up your complaint and investigation process and in particular your witness interviews.

I spent 30 years conducting investigations into violence and workplace violence, and I specialize in working with employers, nonprofits and government agencies on how to implement an effective workplace violence prevention process that focuses on your investigation, witness interviews, and your complaint process.

In 2024, California implemented a very broad workplace violence prevention law. It covers the vast majority of employers in the state.

And their goal here is for you to be able to have an effective complaint and investigation process so that you can prevent workplace violence from happening again.

They want you to use this data, to assess the safety practices that you're doing, to look at ways that they are not working, look at the ways that they can be improved, and also to figure out why those incidents are happening.  And that includes if that involves your employees, members of the public, clients, or patients, or customers, or or people who are personally known to your employees, but who don't work at your workplace.

Information is a tool and we want that tool to be as effective as possible. That's why California wants you to set up an effective complaint process.

That means a safe way for employees to bring forward complaints, and concerns about their workplace safety. And to be able to do so without having to worry about retaliation.

And to feel confident that when they bring forward a complaint, that it is adequately handled, and properly investigated. That any corrective actions that need to be taken are actually taken, and that you make your workplace as safe as possible.

Building that confidence also comes from the investigation process.

And in a nutshell, most employers are not good at conducting in-house internal investigations of allegations, whether it's workplace violence, sexual harassment, or any of other types of incidents that can incur within the workplace.

For employers, one of the worst things that you can do is fail to investigate an allegation because, it can happen again, and that really exposes you to liability.

Especially if conducting an inadequate investigation looks like you're shielding someone. Then you can be on the hook for allegations regarding retaliation, which not only does California prohibit, but which can also lead to punitive damages. Millions of dollars worth.

California is a no fault state when it comes to workplace violence incidents falling under worker's compensation.

But that does not mean an employee can't sue you. There are ways that an employee can still sue you over a workplace violence incident.

As can members of the public who are involved in a workplace violence incident. And if it looks like you're not doing your investigations with any real effort to get to the truth of what happened, perhaps because maybe one employee is really productive and the employer favors that employee, or maybe they don't like an employee, the one who's bringing the complaint, so they really don't care if the person leaves.

I've seen that enough times to know it's a real concern.

One of California's requirements under it's workplace violence prevention law is to be able to bypass the direct supervisor of the employees involved in a situation where there is coworker on coworker or type 3 workplace violence allegations.

And that's because supervisors can be biased, or can actually be part of the incident that led to the workplace violence allegation.

So you need to have a separate process for removing the direct supervisors and making sure that it goes to someone else who your employees can trust.

Now California law requires that you have "effective procedures for an employer to accept, evaluate, and respond to report of workplace violence" and allegations of workplace violence.

California is most likely to allow anonymous complaints. But, while it makes it trickier to do so, that doesn't absolve you of the responsibility of conducting an investigation.

You're still required to conduct an effective investigation.

By the way, California uses that term effective multiple times throughout the law because the state doesn't want employers doing the bare minimum just to serve as CYA.

While you are looking to get to the bottom of the complaint that happens so that you can prevent it from happening again, you also want to use these types of investigations as ways to assess how effective your overall practices are.

For example, there may be safety hazards involving clients and customers that come to the workplace that you thought you were addressing through your workplace violence prevention plan that it turns out based upon the complaints that you're receiving, that your process is actually not remedying these safety hazards.

So you need to use this information from your investigation to conduct an assessment, to go back and look at what approaches you've taken, and tweak those, or even completely reconfigure those, because the goal is to make those safety hazards go away, to be minimized, and when possible, to remediate them completely.

One of the other things that California requires you to do is to incorporate a way to make it compulsory for your employees and your supervisory personnel to participate in these investigations and to be truthful within that process.

So you need to lay out in detail how your employees' complaints will be investigated. How employees will be notified or the results of the investigation, and how employees will be notified about the corrective actions taken as a result of the findings from your investigation.

One of the things that we tend to forget about when we look at our complaint and investigation process is that not everybody involved in a workplace violence incident actually works for your company.

California will require you to be able to identify people who are not from the company, and where possible to incorporate them into your investigations.

This is a change to the original law that is most likely going to be incorporated by the end of the year, but it's a very important one.

Because independent people can provide that independent perspective and give you that data that you need to really understand in its entirety what took place in a workplace violence incident so that you can prevent it from ever happening again.

When you do your investigations, Your staff need to understand how to conduct a witness interview.

And that means not just asking questions.

It's not about preparing a list of questions that you have to go over.

It's about understanding the elements of the complaint, and getting the witness, or the complainant, or the respondent, to be able to lay out in detail what happened, and then to get them to be able to do it with sufficient clarity, to help you kind of go through all of the data once it's all collected, once you finish your entire investigation, and make determinations.

A lot of employers prefer an investigation where they can't make a determination. 

But you know what?

Credibility matters in conducting an investigation, and that can be the basis to make a finding.

And besides that, if you conduct investigations and get no findings, you are not doing anything to prevent the workplace violence from happening again down the road.

So we want to go ahead and conduct that full, effective investigation, get to the bottom of what happened, but also look at where the failures were, and how those failures can be addressed.

Finally, when you do the, your workplace violence prevention, complaints, and investigation process, like we said, you want to, You want to get your employee feedback on what took place with the incident.

Why did it occur? What things could have prevented that from happening? So that you can incorporate that information to make your workplace safer.

If you found this information helpful and you would like some help with a workplace violence prevention program, if you would like help with training your HR staff or your safety staff and how to conduct an investigation, including how to conduct witness interviews schedule a free consultation.