Neutral Evaluation Services
Gain valuable and actionable insights into team, group and departmental workplace issues.
A powerful remedy for serious and complex workplace issues.
HR and managers often find themselves in difficult, no-win situations. TCM’s innovative neutral evaluation service provides our customers with an impartial assessment of workplace issues. Delivered by highly skilled human resources and employee relations professionals, these services are designed to identify the root cause of challenges and offer clear, actionable recommendations for potential solutions. By outsourcing the evaluation and recommendation process, significant stress is alleviated for everyone involved.
What is a neutral evaluation?
When it comes to team conflicts, managerial concerns, employee complaints and behavioural issues, it can often be difficult to know where to begin. Such workplace issues can result in suspicion, mistrust, and a decline in performance amongst team members.
Our neutral evaluation process is an extremely robust tool for identifying what is going wrong, what impact it is having and, critically, what the potential remedies might be.
Unlike a formal investigation, a neutral evaluation is solution focussed. This means that we avoid the formal, evaluative and often stressful conditions that investigations can create. It must be stressed that the process must not result in a sanction.
TCM’s neutral evaluation gives your employees, managers and others the opportunity to have a open and frank dialogue with our highly trained and experienced evaluators. Confidential and anonymous interviews are always conducted in a psychologically safe environment. Our evaluators will then review and analyse all responses to provide your organisation with a clear set of recommendations designed to help build trust, respect and confidence.
Which scenarios can a neutral evaluation be used for?
During the neutral evaluation process, we collect a wide range of information about your staff, the organisation, its systems and culture. This allows you to outsource the most complex element of the decision making while leaving you with the choice when determining what subsequent action to take. The process is suited to a full range of scenarios.
Our 20 years of experience have taught us that any fact-finding process can trigger feelings of uncertainty, anxiety and fear amongst the parties involved. To enable parties to feel safe and secure, we apply our unique FAIR Model™ across all our evaluations. The model advocates a compassionate, empathetic and nonconfrontational approach to interviewing. This has benefits, both for the individuals involved, and the process as a whole.
Our neutral evaluations offer support with a wide array of serious and complex cases including:
- Individual, or collective grievances.
- Disputes at board or SLT level.
- Industrial relations disputes.
- Team conflicts, disputes and disagreements.
- Breakdowns in relations in project teams.
- Allegations of bullying, harassment or discrimination.
- Complaints around duty of care, health and safety, or working environments.
- Poor management or leadership behaviours.
- Anonymous complaints of misconduct across teams or departments
- Allegations made via speak-up or whistleblowing channels
TCM's innovative neutral evaluation methodology.
Our unique approach has been designed specifically to help understand the culture within an organisation, the root cause of conflict your teams may be facing, and how they can move forward. Our evaluators will undertake a thorough evaluation of the current situation, before producing a detailed final report outlining possible remedies and solutions. The process typically consists of 5 key phases:
This initial phase is focused on planning for the evaluation. We will work with your key stakeholders to agree the scope and terms of reference for the audit and to plan our surveys and interview questions.
To gather input from as many individuals as possible, we invite all relevant parties to partake in a confidential survey, with content typically reflecting the same content as the latter interview stages.
To gain a more thorough insight from the individuals more closely involved with the reported issue(s), we also conduct 1-1 interviews. All participants can volunteer to take part and will be supported through the process in a psychologically safe environment.
Once all of the available evidence has been obtained, we will collate, review and analyse the information. As part of this we will conduct a root cause (SWOT) analysis to support the development of recommended actions.
During the final stage, we will build a comprehensive final report, which provides an executive summary of the key findings from the Neutral Evaluation process. This report will detail a number of key findings around the most relevant identified issues such as:
- Equality, Diversity & Inclusion
- Wellbeing
- Bullying & Harassment
