HR investigation methodology: the People’s Approach as the spine of every case

The phrase HR investigation methodology tends to land in buyer conversations as a search for the spine of the case — the named sequence that holds HR review inside the flow instead of leaving it to be bolted on after the fact. The People’s Approach is the platform’s answer to that search. Intake, fact-finding, decision, coaching, and documentation move in order, and every step has a deliverable and a next step. A buyer who already knows the names of those five moves is asking for the platform to enforce them; a buyer who is shopping for the methodology is asking for a sequence they can present back to their HR team and their employment counsel without having to translate it.

What makes the methodology durable is that HR review is the standard step inside the flow, not the review that gets scheduled once the draft lands. The fact-finding output is the input to HR review — never a substitute for it — and any draft that touches protected-class framing or lands adjacent to FMLA gets a second reviewer before any employment action. Severance and release language still routes through employment counsel before sending; the platform does not send severance on the HR team’s behalf, and that is by design. The walk-through for how each step produces its own record is captured in how the People’s Approach runs an end-to-end case — intake through documentation, with the HR-review log living in the same case file as the draft itself.

The audience for the methodology splits along three lines, and the tier they sit on reflects the seat count and the second-reviewer posture they need rather than the methodology itself. The Solo HR Pro tier covers the HR director running point alone, with HR review running inline and counsel-route-severance handled as a one-off step before sending. The HR Team tier adds the second-reviewer signoff that larger ER teams require before any deliverable lands, and the Enterprise tier covers multi-jurisdiction posture with org-wide visibility and audit-trail exports. The split between the three is described in detail on the pricing page, and the case-file integrity posture — every tier inherits the same ordered record — is unchanged across the bands.

An HR investigation methodology only earns its keep when the legal line is plain on the page. The platform is not legal advice — drafts are starting points for HR review, severance language routes through employment counsel, protected-class framing and FMLA-adjacent context get a second reviewer before any employment action. Data isolation, retention, the HR-review log, and the audit-trail export that produces from one case URL are part of the record, not a side thread. Jurisdictions, isolation, retention, and org-wide visibility are spelled out on the buyer FAQ so HR can verify the posture in one place before opening a single intake.

Treating HR investigation methodology as the spine of the case means the sequence holds whether or not the buyer paces fact-finding with AI. HR review is the step inside the flow; the regulator-flag callouts are written into the draft at the moment the draft is written; severance and release language routes through employment counsel; the protected-class and FMLA-adjacent context gets a second reviewer before any employment action. The audit trail produces from one case URL, and the HR-review log lives in the same file as the draft. That is the methodology, end-to-end, exactly the same way whether the case is one intake or fifteen.