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HR Voices is a scenario-based podcast for People Leaders who’ve actually had to make the call.
Each episode brings experienced HR and People leaders into realistic, anonymized workplace scenarios—the kind you recognize immediately. Performance issues. Messy conflicts. Investigations that don’t fit neatly into a policy box. Instead of talking about their own companies, guests react to outside cases and walk through how they’d think it through in real time.
There are no right answers here. What you’ll hear is judgment: how seasoned leaders balance risk, fairness, legal reality, and humanity when the stakes are high and the path isn’t obvious.
HR Voices is for HR, People Ops, legal, and leaders who want to hear how other smart humans actually handle employee relations—without confidentiality breaches, hypotheticals that feel fake, or a lecture on “best practices.”
Rebecca Taylor (00:01)
Hello and welcome to HR Voices. I'm your host, Rebecca Taylor, and I'm here with Amrita Bhaumik, the VP of HR at Team Car Care. Amrita, welcome.
Amrita Bhaumik (00:11)
Thanks Rebecca for having me.
Rebecca Taylor (00:14)
I'm so excited to have you here. I think we first met almost maybe three weeks ago, almost a month ago maybe, so I'm excited that we're here. And for those who are new here, HR Voices explores real and fabricated anonymized employee relations scenarios through the lens of experienced HR and people leaders just like Amrita here. So we're gonna evaluate realistic workplace situations and demonstrate how anyone will assess risk, apply judgment.
Amrita Bhaumik (00:23)
Mom's helping.
Rebecca Taylor (00:42)
and design practical responses. you our goal is to really kind of talk about and reveal how strong HR leaders think when facing ambiguity. We're not necessarily looking to find a single correct answer, which is always sort of the thing that I'll say, because that's the thing about HR. There's not always a single correct answer in most situations as much as we may wish that there would be. So our scenario for today is actually a scenario from the headlines. So this was a real situation that happened. It's called
the viral racist incident and it was featuring a Cinnabon employee. essentially the way that this scenario goes is a customer records a frontline employee at a national food chain directing racial slurs at a couple, including the employee openly declaring racist views on camera. The video goes viral within hours, generating millions of views and widespread outrage. The company terminates the employee the same day.
Legal commentators later raised questions about whether the company conducted any investigation before firing, whether the video was authenticated, and whether the speed of the termination, driven by public pressure, sets a precedent that could be exploited in the era of deep fakes and AI-generated content. So this is a really light topic for a Friday afternoon for us to dive into and discuss. ⁓
Amrita Bhaumik (01:58)
Yeah.
Rebecca Taylor (02:03)
Let's start, I love to start kind of at the beginning. So when we look at, let's say, you know, this is a scenario that you're faced with and something that's happening. ⁓ You know, tell me about where you would start. So before we start to think about solutions or even comment on, you know, what happened and what didn't happen, what stands out to you as the most risky or the most unclear in the situation?
Amrita Bhaumik (02:27)
Yeah, thank you so much Rebecca for, ⁓ you know, suddenly this opportunity to speak. you know, before I dive in, it just hits home because this is so, ⁓ it's so familiar to, I wouldn't say something that we're facing every day, but, particularly, you know, as an HR leader, I'm leading a large employee relations team for a very distributed multi-site business like automotive services business that is Team Car Care. is the biggest franchisee of Jiffy Lio.
⁓ These are situations that we are kind of facing pretty often. ⁓ And I think for me, at least when I think about this incident that you narrated, for me, a couple of things kind of stick out. One is, you know, ⁓
Was there a due process followed in terms of the termination? While the company acted swiftly, and I do understand they were trying to balance the pressure on the brand as well as what seemingly had been recorded on camera, which is a big bane of our existence because...
everything is now recorded and potentially an incident which with the help of social media becomes amplified. ⁓ So it's that balance which so that's kind of unclear to me from at least the first narration that was that followed in terms of
Rebecca Taylor (03:37)
Mm-hmm.
Amrita Bhaumik (03:52)
a due process and looking into what really happened and did we kind of balance the speed of action with being thorough in what action was taken ⁓ precisely from what you raised earlier from a precedence perspective. So I think those are the couple of things that stick out to me.
Rebecca Taylor (04:04)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, just
that they're reacting. It's almost like HR is reacting to something and it's unclear and unsure as to whether or not they actually confirmed whether or not it happened, right? Like if it really happened.
Amrita Bhaumik (04:27)
Yes, that's the hard part because certainly again being a part of a retail scenario, I can see how critical it is to balance, especially the parent company. For them the brand is extremely important and it's the reputation which kind of goes far. So how do we balance that? We can't go too slow in terms of our reaction because that implies that we are not taking it seriously enough. But at the same time, are we acting too fast without following all the due diligence and the process?
So that's always hard to do. The second thing I think I would also like to call out that it seems like it was at a franchisee location. So the ultimate employment decisions are by the franchisee owner. So the question is that, you know, is also not fully clear to me, but I'd probably be digging in a bit more to understand that who took the decision for terminating the employment and, you know, who was involved in the decision. So those are a couple of things that would
that at least I question.
Rebecca Taylor (05:29)
Yeah, yeah. And I think it's a good call out to sort of, you know, indicate franchisee as the decision maker versus sort of corporate, right? Because when we hear Cinnabon, maybe we think of, you know, the actual franchisee, you know, franchise location, or maybe we think about something like this, I'm sure escalates to corporate once it becomes something so big as this, right? ⁓ But I'd love to talk a little bit more about, you know, some of the things as you're on this journey to understand, ⁓ you know,
Amrita Bhaumik (05:37)
Yes.
Yeah.
Rebecca Taylor (05:59)
How do you start your investigation? Like if you're sort of making a plan, you know, who do you need to hear from? And who do you want to avoid speaking to too early?
Amrita Bhaumik (06:09)
Yeah, so I think I would hope that in this particular situation, as with most of us in retail environments, you have a defined sort of SOP for handling investigations. So I would definitely start with talking to people at the store over there and talking in the sense of the store managers particularly, because the store managers like the first line of defense, right? The frontline managers would have witnessed this situation ⁓ or whatever situation happened there, make sure
they are part of the investigation process and ⁓ as far as possible document everything. And we often get told in HR that HR is trying to protect the company, but we are actually protecting the situation and making sure that there is a record of whatever we are discussing. So that's extremely important to make sure that it's documented appropriately. What I would avoid is stretching it out too far and talking to too many
maybe witnesses or know store employees because we don't want Chinese whisper and we don't want
people's individual color sort of coming in to the incident. and you know, another sort of way, and we've employed that as well, that if there are sort of cameras and recording devices present in the store, so that kind of is always a first line of truth, and you you kind of get those records as well. So I would definitely make sure that there is a strong employee relations team which is conducting an unbiased
Rebecca Taylor (07:31)
Mm-hmm.
Amrita Bhaumik (07:46)
factual, know, sort of fact-finding process as soon as they can on this incident. And then, of course, coming back and making sure that there is a proper reporting done. ⁓ It's ideal if, you know, the company also has some mechanisms in place, particularly here, to make sure that any kind of recording which has been done is not a deepfake or is not just AI-generated, you know, mean, making sure that there are some mechanisms to assess that.
Rebecca Taylor (08:09)
Yeah.
Amrita Bhaumik (08:12)
And ⁓ I think the third most important thing, which I think from a really from a mid to long term perspective is to make sure we have a social media policy in place or the company has that because in such situations, it can be so overwhelming for the frontline manager who's possibly facing the onslaught of the questions and the viral comments, et cetera. So make sure that they know how to respond and they're trained in that process.
Rebecca Taylor (08:39)
Yeah, it's a really good call out, especially in a situation where you're working with a workforce that deals with the general public. You know, it's they're interacting with anybody and anything at any time, right? So having really, really clear parameters about social media to your point is, I think, really important, especially when you can feel you can feel a compulsion to protect yourself or to defend yourself, even if whether you're the person in the video or not. Right. And so.
Amrita Bhaumik (08:44)
Yes.
Yes, yes. Yes.
Yes. Yes.
Yes. Yes.
Rebecca Taylor (09:05)
You know, you're right, having governance and guidelines that sort of say, here's what you do and don't do, really, really
important. Yeah.
Amrita Bhaumik (09:11)
One
of the other aspects of that is, I always recommend, it's important to keep in mind the principles of natural justice. So irrespective of what you're seeing in the video, if you're doing an unbiased investigation, I would first recommend suspension of the said employee versus an immediate action of termination. Because once you've suspended the person, you've taken them away from the scene, you've conducted your unbiased
sort of assessment. ⁓ It keeps an opportunity open for ⁓ really making sure that there was an incident which corroborates ⁓ that what the employee did was wrong. ⁓ before that, suspend the person and give everybody a fair chance to be part of the process.
Rebecca Taylor (10:03)
Yeah, I think it's great because my next question for you is going to be what would you not do yet and why? So you wouldn't push them out yet. You wouldn't fire them or you wouldn't ignore it either. know, I think it's smart. Suspend them, you know, with pay without pay, whatever, you know, whatever makes the most sense in this situation, but just buy yourselves a little bit of time to figure out what's going on here, right? Especially in something so emotionally charged where things are going viral. It's a serious thing, you know. Yeah.
Amrita Bhaumik (10:08)
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Yes. Yes. Yes. What's going on? Yes, exactly.
It's hard. And the other thing, I think there is no harm in also reaching out to the concerned customers who were supposedly at the receiving end of this situation. I think just a small note or calling them up and say, hey, we've seen this. does not reflect what the organization stands for. Certainly not in line with our how we want our brand to be represented or we want our employees to kind of represent the organization. So we're looking into it.
Rebecca Taylor (10:37)
Mm.
Amrita Bhaumik (11:00)
Just assure the customers as well that you are not being hurt.
Rebecca Taylor (11:00)
Yeah.
Yeah. I was going to ask you that, would you involve the customer or, or offer a conversation, right? Cause the customer might say, I don't want to talk to anybody, you know, offer a conversation, offer them the space to be heard. And also I think maybe let them know as much as you can about how the situation is at least being investigated. Right. Yeah.
Amrita Bhaumik (11:12)
Yes.
Yes, exactly. Just
to ensure that it is being looked into and I think I would refrain from putting out any kind of statements and stuff before we've actually completed the process.
Rebecca Taylor (11:35)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's important too, especially when you're looking at something that has so many eyes on it, something that's truly going viral, that really is, you know, everyone's going to have an opinion. There's like, you have to say something at some point, but you don't want to say anything too soon. But yeah, that's sort of the juggle, which we'll kind of get into, you know, into that a little bit more. ⁓ And what do you think is sort of a mistake that HR teams might make in a situation like this?
Amrita Bhaumik (11:49)
Yes.
Thanks.
Yeah.
⁓ I think,
you know, although it's part of the job, but it's really to make sure that you conduct an unbiased investigation, right? So oftentimes that's hard to do because there are something which seems extremely egregious and you are getting into that situation and you think that, it's, do I keep a neutral sort of outlook? So that's a mistake that I've kind of seen. Certainly, you know, not following the process in terms of what it's laid down, as I said, know, a suspension versus a termination.
⁓ And if you don't have a plan for investigation, so the process of investigation really needs to be ⁓ making sure that you touch all the aspects of it and be very thorough about it, document it effectively. So if you're not doing that, it just leaves it open to interpretation ⁓ and something which cannot be potentially legally defended later. So those are some of the mistakes I would say that HR teams need to avoid.
Rebecca Taylor (13:06)
Yeah, yeah, I'll emphasize with you on the documentation part too. Just write everything down, every conversation, gather as much as you can, whether it's emails or whatever information you can just to make sure that you have that as part of the case so you know that you have the full story and you're not missing things. So at some point we're doing the investigation, we're kind of validating whether or not this incident actually did happen, which is.
Amrita Bhaumik (13:06)
Mm-hmm.
Yes.
Yes.
Correct.
Rebecca Taylor (13:33)
A wonderful little part of the new world of technology that we're in, right? Like you can see someone do something and not even know if it actually happened. So we're validating that. getting, you know, we're talking to the people who were there. We're talking to the customer. At some point, HR has to make a call of some kind, right? So can you walk me through how you'd weigh some of the competing pressures? Not even what the call should be, but like, what are you juggling and how do you weigh those?
Amrita Bhaumik (13:39)
Yeah.
you
I think, well, all through my career, it's been fairly, ⁓ I mean, the first point of consideration is what is the company policy or what do we stand for as, what is the company policy? What are the processes? How do we want to be known? What are our values? So if there is something which is ⁓ through the investigation is revealed that it is misaligned with that, ⁓ it's, I would think, a pretty easy decision. So it's a matter of, of course, not a unilateral decision.
which HR takes, but it just makes that conversation so much more easier, I would think, because you have that perspective and context to look at. ⁓ I think in terms of future steps and actions on this particular case, really, if upheld that indeed it is an accurate incident which happened, then involving, of course, your legal team, involving employee relations lawyers, as well as the operations team, and making sure that everybody
is fully aligned with the outcome of the investigation and the suggested way forward. So I think that is extremely important. of course, also looking at precedents because some sudden
you when you, as you investigate, you find that there are probably, there was some early warning signals or there were some ⁓ incidents which were overlooked or not probably handled the right way. So did that happen? Making sure all that is also bubbled up to see that we are, we take some lessons from it for the future. So it's, that, I mean, it's, doing all of it pretty speedily. So as I said, you know, it's extremely important to balance that because every minute that you kind of take over this process while being thorough,
Rebecca Taylor (15:35)
Mm-hmm.
Amrita Bhaumik (15:42)
is also impacting your brand in this age of social media. ⁓ it's balancing it with that sense of urgency.
Rebecca Taylor (15:51)
Yeah, I think that's the hardest part is the time pressure because you want to move fast to make sure that you're clear that you're addressing the situation or if there is something that you need to take action on that's blatantly obvious. You want to make it clear that you can do that quickly. But it's like if you act too fast then...
Amrita Bhaumik (15:56)
Yes.
Yep.
Rebecca Taylor (16:16)
You could be missing things. You could be setting a precedent that doesn't actually reflect the values of the organization or even the legal protections of people, right? You know, there's just so much there if you're moving too quickly. And how do you factor in the, I guess, the public opinion part? Because, you know, when something goes viral, there's sort of the part where it's everywhere, and then it just disappears and people are on to the next thing. So how does the virality element and the social pressure element get weighted for you?
Amrita Bhaumik (16:21)
Yes. Yes. Yes.
It's part of your brand and your image. I think I briefly mentioned it at the start that it is extremely important to have a social media policy in place because that sort of guides not just incidents like this which are unfortunate or become viral, but it also guides how an employee who's in your uniform, let's say, or at your store is behaving because it's to emphasize the fact
that every minute you're donning our uniform or you're... ⁓
in the store you are representing the brand. It doesn't matter whether you're working for a franchisee or you're working for the corporate or whatever but you're representing the brand and there are some very strict guidelines in terms of what you can and cannot do even when you're personally representing yourself in your personal social media handles etc. So that training is extremely important to prevent such things from happening. I think ⁓ that's the start, it's foundational and it's with real scenario.
you know, we, as I said, know, ⁓ large retail businesses, they kind of send out their books and at the time of orientation, expect everybody's read the 160 pages and they know exactly what's going on. But more often than not, it's the scenarios which are so nuanced, but constant training around it is critical. talking about it and, you know, mentioning that this is what we are seeing. hey, this is not acceptable or this is not what you do. So I think things like that.
Rebecca Taylor (18:11)
Yeah.
Amrita Bhaumik (18:21)
So the key is the training and constant reinforcement.
Rebecca Taylor (18:25)
Yeah, yeah. I think the training is so important too. I mean, I remember when I, one of my first HR jobs, was, uh, I was working in HR for a store on fifth Avenue. So I was working at Lord and Taylor. So big department store with like a thousand employees. Um, on the holidays, we were 2000 people cause we double our staff and seasonal. like lots and lots of people, high volume, high traffic situation. And I was the trainer. So I had to.
Amrita Bhaumik (18:42)
Yes.
Rebecca Taylor (18:49)
train everyone on all the store policies. And like you said, this is a document, you know, it's a handbook that's super thick that no one remembers, you know, at the end of the day. And I remember the part that would always get the most attention was we would have sort of not rules of conduct, but sort of like best practices, I guess you'd call them for interacting with hostile customers. Because sometimes customers will just bring out the worst in you. Racism aside, right? Like there's their, that's its own issue, but just in how
Amrita Bhaumik (18:54)
Yes. Yes.
Yes.
Rebecca Taylor (19:19)
The general public can push your buttons. And when you're representing an organization to your point, when you're wearing the uniform, the name badge, whatever it is, you you kind of have to, you have to have the tools to handle that so that, and practice that so that you have those skills when you don't need them. So when they do come up, you know, you maybe, even if it's just, you just learned to just step aside and call your manager, which was, was basically our default. It's like, you don't have to handle customers that are being unreasonable.
Amrita Bhaumik (19:30)
Yes. Yes.
Yes.
Yes. Yes. Yeah.
Rebecca Taylor (19:49)
This is what your managers are trained for and frankly what they're paid for. But it all relies on employees tapping into that when the moments come up, which is hard, you know?
Amrita Bhaumik (19:51)
Yes.
You're right, you're absolutely right. And it is, you know, the customer's right, but up to a point and reasonableness is extremely important. And, you know, training our frontline managers again, as you said, to learn how to de-escalate the situation, right, and handle it. So it's a constant reinforcement of that. So... ⁓
It's not an easy job, but at the same time, ⁓ what I've seen is that people with the true passion of wanting to be with customers and dealing with people, they like doing this job. So how do we equip them with the tools and resources to handle it?
Rebecca Taylor (20:35)
Yeah. Yeah. And here's the question. So when you do have someone who has sort of that, you know, you have a staff that has that sort of heart and passion for working with customers, knows what they're signing up for when, you know, you're working with the general public. ⁓ you know, what's something that let's say you're onboarding the, you know, groups of managers or groups of people to handle, you know, just ambiguous situations like this. What's one thing you'd change about how employee relations is taught to managers specifically?
Amrita Bhaumik (21:03)
Yeah, so and it's an interesting point you raise because again, drawing a quick reference to the business that you know, I support it is you firstly need to be very passionate about cars because everybody from the general manager to you know, starting techie, they're all they love working in cars, right? So they're, you know, they just love getting under under the hood and working on your vehicle. But it doesn't necessarily mean that they also like working with customers, right? Because it's a different skill.
Here's what we found the interesting thing is that we've said we can, you know, that's kind of in at least the talent acquisition or the hiring process. We always say that we can teach you how to service a vehicle, change oil or change your windshield wiper, but we cannot teach customer.
you know, really wanting to be with customers. that's the sort of, think the competency of the skill that we at least look for at the hiring process itself to see that you do truly like being with customers. And here are the situations that you're likely to face, even though your customer is probably not going to leave the vehicle, they'll keep sitting there, but there are very different situations that you'll face every day. So we try and watch out for that or assess for that rather, to see if that's truly an area of interest. And in terms of employee relations, I think,
Rebecca Taylor (21:54)
Yeah.
Amrita Bhaumik (22:21)
It really starts at the top, know, what we call as the head of the household or in the store general manager making sure that, you know, they ⁓ really are invested in our guest principles and they do ⁓ truly believe that, you know, focusing on customer attention is one of your KRAs, you know, and it's extremely important for that store. So how do you do that? And how do you, you know, create an environment where everybody is demonstrating the same behavior? So that's extremely, I think,
critical in terms of the training that we do. And really, I think it's a reinforcement, as I said, through ⁓ situations that we see and we kind of observe where things could have been done differently to de-escalate a situation or handle a customer better, constant training on that. So these would be, I think, the two, three things that we at least do from an HR perspective.
Rebecca Taylor (23:09)
Yeah.
Yeah, I think I love that. And in this kind of scenario, when you're looking at it's a franchisee location, ⁓ so you mentioned that there are certain different decision makers at different levels when you're working with franchises, right? So who ultimately owns the outcome here?
Amrita Bhaumik (23:51)
It's definitely our role to protect the brand and protect the company ⁓ processes and what the brand and...
In our case, it's Jiffy Lube, Shell, et cetera. But ⁓ in case of this particular franchise, it is a set of awards. while they own the decision, they really need to be mindful of following the due processes and making sure that the customer is also being addressed, as well as the media. So ⁓ it's the owner's decision, but making sure with all the due processes being
followed particularly the HR and legal ramifications of it.
Rebecca Taylor (24:36)
Yeah. And I agree with that. And maybe even Cinnabon corporate giving those franchisees the tools to do that, right? Giving them the policies, the standards, the, is the Cinnabon way. When in doubt, this is your handbook. If you need help navigating, that's where I think the teamwork part kind of comes in, especially in a situation. A franchisee might not get everybody involved, might not get corporate involved in just a typical termination, right? But something that has
Amrita Bhaumik (24:48)
Yes. Yes. Exactly.
Absolutely.
Yes.
Rebecca Taylor (25:06)
the virality element and the social media element, think you kind
of have to call someone and say, hey, we might need some help here. Yeah. So we're just at the end of our conversation, which is crazy because we could keep on going, I think. ⁓ But I have one last question for you. So, you know, for those folks, those HR folks who are listening to this and kind of looking for, you know, just more guidance about navigating the gray and the nuance and everything, you know, what's what's
Amrita Bhaumik (25:12)
Yes, 100 percent.
Rebecca Taylor (25:33)
what advice would you give to someone or what advice would you give to an HR leader who's facing a scenario like this for the first time?
Amrita Bhaumik (25:40)
Yeah, I mean, I think that's you said it very right. It's the grays. So in HR, I think it's navigating the grays which becomes the
critical skill that I guess with experience one develops. ⁓ I would just advise that making sure that ⁓ they've been thorough, they've been unbiased, and they've made sure that they've documented everything, at least in the process of the investigation which was conducted. There is a very real pressure of time because there will be the corporate reputation, as I said, which is at stake. And there is obviously it's been
at it from multiple directions but to kind of make sure that even through all that noise and that pressure making sure that they do their job and they follow the due process and they are
They are independent voice. So trying not to lose sight of that ever. ⁓ And I think ⁓ really making sure that you partner with your legal team, your employer relations lawyers, with the operations teams, just to make sure that the decision which is taken and ultimately arrived at has everybody's buy-in. ⁓ So HR has that wide-angle lens, and they are able to see implications which oftentimes operations, et cetera, may not see.
So make use of that and know speak about speak out about it and things so these would be the top two three things and anything on a longer term do sort of in kind of ⁓ Insist or you know try and see if we can put in a mechanism for training and equipping our frontline managers because the other ones were really facing the situation day to day and the more trained they are the Better and it would be and lesser would be such kind of incidents
Rebecca Taylor (27:36)
That's excellent advice. And thank you for sharing that too. And thank you for sharing your perspective and your wisdom and everything with everybody here too. I think this one is one, I think that ⁓ there's so many different versions of it that might be happening. And I'm curious to kind of see, since this is an actual story from the headlines, what precedent this sets and sort of how this kind of impacts how we all might have to make these decisions in the future. ⁓ So thank you for having this conversation with me thank you for being here. This was fun.
Amrita Bhaumik (27:51)
Yeah.
Yes.
Of course, it was fun for me Rebecca. Thank you for the opportunity indeed.
Rebecca Taylor (28:09)
Yeah, thank you. Thank you everybody for listening and I hope you have a great day. Bye.
Amrita Bhaumik (28:13)
Thank you,
bye.