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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.”
Paul Brubaker
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[00:00:00] Welcome to HR Voices, a podcast where people leaders share their side of the story. We talk about the challenges they're facing, how they're addressing them, and what changes they hope to see as the workplace evolves. This podcast is sponsored by AllVoices, the all-in-one employee relations platform.
~Right now. Okay. You may have gotten a little popup just to approve it, just to make sure. There we go. All right. And we are off to the races.~ Hello, and welcome to HR Voices. I'm your host, Rebecca Taylor, and I'm here with Paul Brubaker, vice president of HR for North America at Carl Storz. Welcome, Paul. So nice to have you.
Thanks, Rebecca. Nice to be here. Appreciate it. Yeah. And I know, um, some of you who are listening to this for the first time might be new here. So just to let you know, HR Voices explores real and fabricated anonymized employee relations scenarios through the lens of experienced HR and people leaders just like Paul.
So we're gonna evaluate a realistic workplace situation and demonstrate how we'd assess risk, apply judgment, and design practical responses. So our goal is to revere how s- to reveal how strong HR leaders think when facing ambiguity. We're not here to find a single correct answer [00:01:00] because so often in HR, that just does not exist.
So thank you, Paul, for being here to chat through this scenario with me and go through some of the bells and whistles that we might see. Sure. Glad to. It's, uh, as you say, no correct answer exists. It's, uh, it's an art. Yep. So we'll ... I'll have my opinion, and some of your listeners may have different opinions.
That's okay. That's the beauty of it. We can't all agree on everything, right? Or, you know, and it's also, it's so different when you're talking about scenarios when any one scenario can have 80 different outcomes, right? So it's like you're just trying to get to the best outcome that you can with the information you have at the time.
So true. And, uh, if you've got good partners within your company, it's great, because it's the whole diversity issue. You ... I have one framework, and hopefully my colleague has a different framework. And we should hear that and come up with a better answer together than we do alone, so. Hmm. But I'm alone today, so I'll give you my answer.
Well, we're together, so at least we have each other. There you go. You can, you, you can disagree with me if you like. Anything. Yeah. Uh, we'll, we'll [00:02:00] probably debate a little bit. But I also sometimes debate- Perfect ... just to kind of, to show someone what the debate is too. So this'll be fun. Good. Sounds good. So here's our scenario for today.
So we're calling this one the internal investigation leak. HR is conducting a confidential investigation into allegations of financial misconduct by a division VP. The subject of the investigation appears to have been tipped off, changing behavior, purging emails, and coaching direct reports on what to say.
HR believes that the leak came from within HR or legal. HR must conduct an investigation within its own team while sim- while simultaneously managing the original investigation. It cannot pause the financial misconduct inquiry. The VP's attorney sends a preservation letter the same day the internal leak is suspected.
HR must now sequence its response to multiple simultaneous crises without contaminating either inquiry. ~I can talk today, I promise.~ So this one's a doozy, right? Because, you know, you're talking about sort of the calls coming from inside the house. So when you first hear this scenario, before we even dive into [00:03:00] what to do, what stands out to you as the most risky or unclear from what we know so far?
Well, I, I think it's odd and interesting that the attorney, you know, why there's already an attorney for the VP who's under investigation. Mm-hmm. So how did that already happen? And they're putting out a link that says, "Don't destroy anything," which the report says that maybe the VP is coaching people to destroy things.
So it's at odds a little bit there. And of course, given just those facts, a person might jump to the conclusion that the VP is absolutely guilty and they're protecting themselves and all of this stuff. And I think as an HR person we have to step back and stop for a minute and realize, okay, this is the facts we have.
We know we need an investigation. We need to investigate that person. Sounds like we need to investigate [00:04:00] either our own team or our legal team. And, um, and we need to ju- not jump to any conclusions. So we need to have a good plan as we approach it. Clearly we need to already make sure we're following the advice of that attorney, but internal attorneys would say the same, which is, "Don't be deleting relevant emails or anything else."
So we should make sure we put out a notice, with legal's help probably, to, uh, have a legal hold on all of those kinds of things. Yeah. So that would be a starter. And then I would, uh, suggest... Let me just say I've been very fortunate in my career not to work with either companies or leadership teams who did not have high integrity.
Yeah. So thankfully I haven't had to deal with this specific issue. That's good. Uh, there's always an employee, maybe at a lower level, who might have not [00:05:00] had some integrity. We deal with those. Um, and then also when I build my team in HR I let them know, this this is a special post in our company, and if I cannot trust you, you cannot be on my team.
Yeah. And so I've also been fortunate to, I believe, not have people leak things that they shouldn't be leaking. Yeah. But so then if I get legal on board with the, uh, hold, the legal hold, then I would start to approach the- Two different investigations. And I would have to assume that anyone that's involved already, I would probably know who on the team HR-wise or legal is- Yeah
starting to conduct the investigation. So I think I would want to see if I have any other expertise in-house to conduct the investigation separately so that we can remove anyone who might have tainted the [00:06:00] situation. Yeah. Might include going outside to an attorney. I hate to do that. It costs- Just gonna ask
a lot of money. It takes- Yeah ... time. But that's certainly a fallback, certainly a possibility of, of something to do. If we've had some financial malfeasance, we really need to look at that, um, quickly. And if it is a, a, a leader on the leadership team in that company, we need to address it quickly. Yeah.
And there is no-- If we are certain that this happened, and it was this person, that person's gone. There's no compromise, no... They're just gone. Trust is critical. Yeah ... uh, so we just think we'd have to figure out who needs to be approached, who needs to be asked questions of, what are the questions, and who's gonna ask them.
And really the who is the biggest question on the front end. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Especially when you're not sure who is the leaker, [00:07:00] and how do you kind of, you know, could it be someone who was already on the case you know, because they're doing this sort of confidential investigation? Or, you know, is it someone who somehow had access to that information?
'Cause sometimes when you're in HR, you can see everything, and sometimes there are tiers of permissions for whatever level of, you know, information you're able to access, even within HR, depending on the size of your organization. I mean, I know you're working with a large organization. I would assume not every HR person knows everything, right?
I assume the higher up you get, the more access to information you have, 'cause that's some of the benefit of, growing and having the, you know, the bigger title. So what are some things that you're-- What are some assumptions that you're fighting early on when you first hear this? I have some, so I'm curious what you might be fighting.
Yeah, I mean, the first assumption is that this executive is guilty as heck, because you, you see these things happening, and you, you [00:08:00] just assume they must be guilty, and that they must have been the ones that ordered these things to be deleted and people to say certain things. So that's the biggest one that hits me.
And, um, yeah that's a crazy one. And that's the one that you have to guard against. You can't assume guilt before you do anything. Yeah. And then- It's so hard. It is, right? Yeah. There's two sides to every story and, and then, you know, and oftentimes in ER we hear this story and we think they're guilty, somebody's guilty, and then we hear this story and we go, "Oh, well, that makes sense, so maybe they're not guilty."
And in the end you can't prove it perhaps. Yeah. Then you've gotta decide, okay, well, what are we going- what's the right remedy? Mm-hmm. Is it just a write-up and a, okay, you know, make sure you don't do these kinds of things, and they stay? Is it a coaching? Is it a... What is it? But [00:09:00] the ER person or investigation team does have to come to a conclusion.
They've gotta decide one way or another what's gonna happen to someone. Yeah. It's hard. I know, it's so hard. I have, I, it's very hard for me to see that this person is deleting emails and that they already have a lawyer and to still assume they're innocent, which I know we're not... An investigation isn't a trial, right?
So the innocent until proven guilty isn't a thing in HR the same way, but I, I personally try to go into everything with that lens as much as possible because it can be tempting to sort of want to assume guilt because it can be tempting to make it feel more straightforward that way. You kinda have to poke and say, "What I'm looking at might not be the full story.
There could be pieces that are missing. Let's assume everyone's innocent and really find the evidence to back up these allegations." But if you're deleting emails because you hear that someone's investigating you, I don't know, that's a pretty, that's a [00:10:00] pretty hard thing for me to get around. And then I also, an assumption that comes just from years of seeing stuff like this is I would look at if this VP has an outside personal relationship with someone in legal or HR, 'cause I'm like, "Maybe they have a friend on the inside."
Whether it's a romantic relationship, just a friendship, whatever that is, right? And not assume that that automatically means that's the leaker, but just as a, again, my curious hat is on and I'm like, "Who do they talk to outside of work?" And what may have someone have accidentally told them, because it can be an accident.
It doesn't, you know, it could be like, "Oh, we were out last night and something slipped," and now all of a sudden he's got a lawyer and says, and he's deleting emails. Yeah. I mean, it's certainly possible, and depending on size of company, you may know immediately who they're s- Yeah ... who they might be seeing or talking with.
Yeah. Um, and, uh, it, it is interesting, like I said early on, it, that they already have a lawyer. I'm an executive, I don't have a lawyer that I just- Yeah ... call up on the [00:11:00] phone and say, "Hey, uh, I, I got this thing going on." Yeah. Um, so he or she, that executive may, The ride may have been tipped off and to, to go get an attorney involved.
And then it's funny, the attorney's telling them, telling the company not to delete anything when that, potentially that executive is saying, "Oh, delete everything." On the other hand, maybe it's somebody right below them who likes them or wants to protect them, and that person has heard that there's... Maybe they got interviewed and was told that it's a confidential investigation, but they weren't so confidential, so they called all their friends and said, "Hey, remember that email that came out from this person?"
Yeah. "Let's de- delete that one or those five because that's really not a good look." You know, so I mean, there's different scenarios that could go on with this stuff. So it's really important to just approach it methodically. Here are the questions we wanna ask witnesses or people that are potentially [00:12:00] involved.
Here's the questions we wanna ask the complainant and the questions we wanna ask this executive. The problem you're, that you've got in my company, which isn't huge, we have one employee relations person that really does these types of investigations. Yeah. We have HR business partners who have done them, but you know, the one person takes the big investigation.
Yeah. So if, if I'm worried about that one person having divulged something, then who am I gonna have do it? Yeah. And can I keep it in-house? And what I might do is pair up two HR VPs to do the investigation so they can share their own knowledge. Thankfully, we have some tools that would provide us with a template set of questions, some of which don't apply, but some will- Yeah
and you can create your own sub-questions. But, so then you can show that you've asked all these people this sets of questions, and you've got your notes, and you can start to piece [00:13:00] things together. Yeah. Um, but we've ignored the whole other issue, which is who on the HR team or legal team might have spilled the beans?
Yeah. Which we don't know. It's a great question and, and you know, again, this is another one where if you find out that really the investigator on the HR team or the lawyer actually told this executive that they're under investigation and they should watch out and maybe delete some e-... who knows what got said.
Yeah. That person is, is also gone, if you can prove that. Okay? Yeah. There's no gray on this one for me. Yeah. Because it's all about trust. If I can't trust you, you're done. And, and- Yeah ... and that should be true at the leadership level, and it's true in the investigation level. And really it's true for any employee that, that we find that's just lying.
I- I'm sorry Yeah. Oh, I agree. I agree. It's, there's, it's one of those things that that's a non-starter for me too, is just, like, if you're lying, [00:14:00] and if you're trusted with valuable information because you're at that level, right? You're a VP level, you're not... This isn't your first rodeo. Like, you should know better.
There are leadership standards and general expectations of a leader, and a lot of that has to do with integrity, trust, um, and also just good behavior, right, with things like this. And then from the HR side, I mean, HR can sometimes get a bad rep 'cause people don't trust HR. So I feel like the bar for integrity and trust is so much higher just because we're already fighting public opinion sometimes.
Yeah. So this is the thing that I would always struggle with is I would look at it as this person who leaked is making the rest of us look bad. Because now if the organization somehow finds out that there's an HR person who leaked someone's business, then that calls into question the trust of the whole team for the company.
100%. And that's hard. Well said, Rebecca. Yeah, that's really hard. And trying to build trust with [00:15:00] HR so that you're the first to hear rather than the last to hear of an issue- Yeah ... it's critical to your success. As you were talking too, I started to think about, maybe this executive is the anointed one from the president, the next level up, right?
Yeah. CEO. And, and they really like this person, and now you're going to potentially end up terminating that person, right? Yeah. And I was thinking about the courage that it takes to be the representative of the company to, to just, s- you know, this is what has to happen. Yeah. And you've gotta now convince the CEO that this person's going to be terminated and here's why.
And you've got to have the facts- Yeah ... and be ready to defend that, right? Uh, so courage comes into place as well, uh, 'cause you, you may feel your job is, is, uh, threatened or could be threatened if the CEO doesn't like you or whatever. And it [00:16:00] comes in all the time. Oh- Yeah ... we wanna return to office more often, more days a week.
And me, let's say, as the voice of the employee is, "But why?" Our production is still good. We're doing all of this stuff very well. Justify to me why we have to bring people in more often, especially with high gas prices. Yes. Yeah. Right? It costs a lot more- And- ... to go to work now. And so you, you go through these things and it does take courage to speak up, but you have to.
That's your job. Yeah. Your job is not to represent necessarily the employees, but it's the company. If we have employees who are disengaged, who don't trust the company or don't, then we, we lose the the extra effort that they wanna give the company. Uh, i- if they're not engaged and they're just there for a paycheck, that's not, not a great situation.
Mm. So, um, there's so many things we have to think about in [00:17:00] HR. And, uh, some of it's courage, speaking truth to power, all that kind of stuff. But we, we certainly have to at least do our things like investigations or any of the other processes that we do in HR as professionals. We should have a process, and we should follow the process.
Yeah. It really doesn't matter if it's the top person or the bottom person, we gotta- Yeah ... gotta deal with it. It's true. Especially if... You know, I love, I wanna stop and just acknowledge the, the bravery aspect that you mentioned, because it's so true, and I don't think it's said or acknowledged enough, just that it does take bravery to stand up to your CEO or to push back on a decision that you disagree with.
And sometimes we'll push back and we get overruled. It is what it is. Mm. You could say that that's the same for any, you know, any job, any position, right? Numbers. But the having that confidence and speaking truth to power I think comes a lot from also having a lot of, a [00:18:00] lot of data to back up where, you know, where you're coming from, whether that's employee sentiment data or performance data, investigation data, r- right?
Like, ~we talked a little bit about this before we started recording, just your background in finance and kind of coming into HR that way, and me saying when I started in HR, you know, I was really worried about numbers 'cause they don't come naturally to me compared to words.~ It's just, it's always been the way that I am.
Um, but I feel, but that's just something that it's like we have to get comfortable with data because that's what can give us the foundation to be brave. 'Cause we can say, "No, I'm gonna stand up to you, and here's all the evidence and proof that I have that I'm right." There's a lot to that. There is a whole lot.
There is nothing better than having data. Da- you know, uh, a- and we, we were just looking at our diversity data, we look at dashboard data, our s- our service level agreements. How are we doing as, as an entity within the business? Would I wanna hire HR internally? 'Cause if I don't think they're delivering, maybe I wanna go out- outside and hire a whole HR team outside.
Let them- Yeah ... d- deliver it for me. So we need to prove our worth, and we need to [00:19:00] make sure that we're bringing the best to the company. And what does that mean, right? It's, it's starts with the recruiting. We gotta find the best talent We've gotta bring 'em in well so that they understand the company.
We've gotta develop them as the time goes by to keep them so that they're excited about working with us. And these are all critical things. I'm not saying anything that 98, 90, 95% of your listeners don't know, but it's so critical what we do 'cause the business doesn't exist without the talent. And there's a balance because you, you know, people always want more people to help.
Yeah. "Oh, we got so much to do," you know? And at some point there's too many people, and now you're not making enough money to make it make sense to have the business. Yeah. And so you- you've got this dichotomy that goes on all the time. It's a fine line to walk. Uh, but I will say talent wins in the end.
And so if you can [00:20:00] find the right talent and put together a spectacular team, the company's gonna win. And I gave a speech one time about, and I used big words, like win and have fun. So that was my speech, and it was like- It was. I love it ... okay, so, you know, when, when the company wins, we grow. We win another customer, we grow.
That's all good. And then winning is fun, at least for me. I think it's w- way more fun- It is ... to win than it is to lose. I've been in some companies that have had downsizing. You kinda never win that way. And then as the company wins and grows, then the employees can grow. Mm-hmm. And you can give them more responsibility 'cause you've got a bigger company.
And now that you've got a bigger company, maybe you need another one of these or another one of those positions, and the employees can move. And then that's exciting to me. That's a win, to watch people get to grow themselves and their careers. And so then they win and they're happy to be here, so that's fun for them.
Yeah. And so they win and have fun. So they win and have fun, the [00:21:00] company wins, they have fun, and, and then- It's a little cycle ... the customer's getting, getting great stuff. And it's, yeah, it's all- ... just a virtuous cycle, for sure. Yeah. So. I love that 'cause that's also, you know, winning, having fun, it also kinda gives you, you know, this sense, it could give you a sense of purpose in the work that you have, which, you know, if you look at any engagement survey these days, people are really struggling to find purpose in the work that they have.
And I think a lot of it is because of just the market that we're in, the dynamic that we're in, that there's just so much turnover happening in organizations, so, you know, people are kinda just burnt out and trying to figure it out. But when you're kind of looking at it as the whole conversation around tenure and about talent, the more people feel like they're winning, the more of their own- ingenuity, their own sort of engagement they're going to give to their role and their job, and that's when you also get people doing their thing.
And, you know, if people kind of are able to do that, if you get the innovation, you get the connection, they're gonna give customers great [00:22:00] experiences. They're going to build great products. You're gonna have a tenured workforce that has more of that trust. Because we talked about trust as sort of the core of this whole issue here, is that no matter what happens, trust is broken, and that's the biggest thing you're gonna deal with because that's what still exists after this case closes.
But if you have people who have been working together for a while, who've been through stuff together and have, you know, come at it the other side, you're gonna look at situations a lot differently, and you just have a more connected workforce that way. Yeah. We, uh... I'm fortunate to work in a med device company and we improve patient lives.
So- That's amazing ... that purpose resonates with our employee population throughout. So we are very fortunate to have an easier, uh, purpose for people to understand. And, um, so we, we retain people. We were going through some changes quite a bit of change in the recent years. And, uh, one of the engineers of all people said you know, [00:23:00] I've got all these people that are upset with all this change."
And he said, "I ask them two questions. Do you believe in our purpose?" And the people say yes. He says, "Do you like the people you work with?" And they go, "Yes." We have great people, by the way. Yeah. I'll brag. We do. Yeah. You should brag. And so, and then so he says, "So what's wrong with that? Like, just wait it out.
It'll be okay. We'll get through the change, and it'll all be okay. We don't know all the answers today, but it'll be okay." Yeah. And he did alleviate a lot of concern on people's parts just with those two questions. So it was- I love that ... the simplicity was beautiful, right? Yeah. Purpose and people, and we're there.
Yeah. And so, you know, it's not always easy. It doesn't mean it's always easy, but we, uh, we have a spectacular workforce. It's, it's amazing to work here. You know, you can get through a lot of things when you have a, a clear purpose and if you've got great folks to work with. It's fun. Yeah. That's a really, really...
That should be sort of the, that should [00:24:00] be the tagline for this episode, because I could not agree more. It's so true. It's so true. And believe it or not, we're actually just about at time, so I have one more question for you before we wrap. Please. So I know we kind of talked about, you know, advice for, you know, throughout this sort of episode, advice for HR people kind of in this scenario, but, you know, if you could summarize what's one big piece of advice that you have for an HR person who might be facing a similar scenario themselves?
Uh, a similar scenario like we, well, like we've talked about, um- Like a dual investigation like this. Yeah. I think, you know, the advice is just to step back and take a deep breath, and don't assume anything. Don't assume one person's- Yeah ... guilty and another's not, or that you know what happened or anything else.
Go through the process with an open mind. Mm-hmm. And then make sure the process is methodical. That's solid. That's what I would call you to ask for, 'cause sometimes that's what I always struggled with investigations. I always have to call someone to say, "I'm coming in with a lot of [00:25:00] opinions, and I need to kind of like cool them for a minute so that I can actually do this investigation the right way."
So that's advice that I think is just so wise and universal and absolutely needed, especially when you're looking at HR on HR crime, I guess we'll call it. Yeah, totally. It is fun. It is fun. Thank you so much, Paul, for being here. Thank you. And thank you, everybody, for listening, and I hope everybody has a great rest of your day.
Thanks so much, Rebecca.