Interviewing and Evidence Collection Tip: Interviews are Valuable People Evidence

Evidence collected from interviews is an important component of evidence collection.

In TapRooT®, we use a mnemonic to quickly remember what types of evidence we may want to collect after an incident occurs: 3 Ps & an R. This stands for:

People evidence
Paper evidence
Physical evidence and
Recording evidence.

When people think about evidence collection, sometimes they focus on paper evidence (such as collecting policies, procedures, permits, HR records), physical evidence (such as collecting broken equipment and fluid samples), or recording evidence (such as taking or collecting photographs and videos).  They don’t always think of interviewing as evidence, and in spite of the fact that this weekly column is called “Interviewing and Evidence Collection,” interviewing is evidence collection.

Most of the time in a workplace incident investigation, the majority of the evidence will come from people evidence, especially interviews. Often, evidence collection will start there and guide the investigator to collect other types of evidence.

People evidence includes information about those involved with the incident as well as information from those who may not have been there but may have knowledge to provide (example: an expert witness).

We’ve spent a lot of time developing the TapRooT™ 12-Step Interview Process which is a very effective method of getting both quality and quantity of information from an interviewee. This technique is taught in both our 5-Day TapRooT^® Advanced Root Cause Analysis Team Leader Training and our 1-Day Effective Interviewing and Evidence Collection Techniques Course.

Today, we want to offer you some free resources to help you collect valuable people evidence through interviews:

Video:  The Cognitive Interview

Video: How to Interpret Body Language

Top 3 Worst Practices in Root Cause Analysis Interviewing

Thanks for joining me for this evidence collection tip.  See you next week!