People do dumb, mean, or even evil things at work and so we have to do investigations in HR. And the following is pretty common:

"He did this terrible thing to me!" 😭
"I did no such thing. She's lying!" 😡

It's 'he said she said'. Who do you believe????

While it would be tempting to stop there, that's the wrong thing to do. You need to do a CREDIBILITY ASSESSMENT.

Credibility assessments were the subject of my conversation with Bob Stenhouse in response to a question from someone who watched an earlier video. Bob leads Veritas Solutions and they do many investigations every year. Bob is an interesting guy (he used to be an undercover officer) and is an expert in doing credibility assessments. He talks about:

😩DARVO - Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim Offender (see the video below)

🤷🏻‍♀️When someone's truth is not the actual truth.

👀Body language. This is not an effective way of judging credibility.

🗣️Honesty and reliability. These are key pieces of credibility.

This was very fascinating stuff and increases the integrity of how we do our work in HR.

0:00 Intro
1:02 Bob's credibility
2:40 What is a credibility assessment?
4:58 The methodology
6:18 Credibility factors
7:38 Credibility of the complainant?
10:39 Body language?
12:43 The outraged respondent
14:22 Red flags: DARVO
16:29 Guilt or genuine innocence?
17:46 The most common issues
19:02 Can you avoid one?
21:10 When both parties aren't truthful
22:30 Balance of probabilities

Find Bob at Veritas Solutions veritassolutions.net or follow him on LinkedIn. He writes great posts!

Find Andrea for generalist HR consulting in Western Canada at thehrhub.ca