resolving problems
begins with
connection
understanding
insight
experience
trust
who we are
Over decades, Speer Associates has developed trusted relationships with top employers across industries, helping them to resolve their most sensitive employee issues. We provide specialized services that empower clients to manage and resolve workplace complaints and misconduct successfully and in a way that aligns with a respectful, equitable, and productive workplace culture.
With a practice focused on workplace investigations and employee complaint resolution, Speer Associates works at the intersection of employment law, compliance, and organizational culture.
a problem-solving
mindset for the complex
world of workplace
misconduct and disputes
our philosophy
Damaging behavior and unhealthy conflict in the workplace are endemic—and happen to the best of organizations. Through the years, we’ve learned that how an employer manages these problems—and its success (or not) in instilling values of fairness, integrity, and accountability—profoundly affects the employee experience, and organizational and team culture.
We pride ourselves on helping employers take a thoughtful, effective, and values-driven approach to managing employee misconduct and conflict—for the betterment of the workplace and the people in it.
ways we can help
Our clients come to us for different reasons. But they all have one thing in mind: preventing and resolving workplace concerns, disputes, and misconduct that generate risks to the organization’s culture, ideals, reputation, and productivity.
Get in touch
independent investigations
A recognized leader in the field of workplace investigations, Speer Associates performs impartial investigations examining claims of misconduct at all levels of an organization.
With an emphasis on issues affecting senior leaders, we regularly work with executive management, in-house counsel, outside law firms, and boards of directors to deliver clear, candid, and reliable findings that enable organizations to engage in effective decision-making and problem-solving around their most sensitive and consequential employee issues.
Past investigations have examined complaints of bias and discrimination; pay inequities specifically; retaliation; sexual misconduct and sexual assault; a hostile work environment; ethical breaches and varied code of conduct violations; abusive or “toxic” management; neglect of duties; threatening misconduct; workgroup conflicts and disruption; and, in the university setting, Title IX violations.
workplace
culture reviews
Sometimes, employee complaints don’t implicate specific wrongdoing but draw attention to the workplace culture, sparking questions about whether behavior and leadership norms align with the organization’s interest in promoting a respectful, fair, equitable, inclusive, and productive work environment. We regularly conduct assessments designed to identify organizational and legal risks generated by a workplace or a specific team culture that has become misaligned with the organization’s cultural values.
strategic advice
& coaching
Organizations can invest heavily in cultivating and communicating cultural values only to have “culture” fall apart when employees step forward to report concerns. At times, employees encounter an investigations and complaint-resolution system that feels bureaucratic, opaque, and insufficiently focused on identifying and fixing underlying problems.
With decades spent on the front lines of employee concerns and disputes, we advise senior Compliance, Legal, and People officers who wish to maximize their impact by upleveling the organization’s investigations and complaint resolution system.
Applying an Organizational Justice framework, we teach strategies along the entire continuum of complaint resolution—with a special focus on helping clients develop a vibrant and effective internal investigations team.
We provide strategic guidance through needs assessments, individualized consulting, workshops for cross-functional leaders, and hands-on coaching to internal investigations teams.
We partner with clients not only to enhance problem-solving and mitigate risk, but to meet demands for fairness, consistency, excellence, and ethical leadership in this critical organizational function.
arbitration
Despite early resolution efforts, workplace disputes at times progress to formal adjudication. An established neutral who has spent a career successfully working with thousands of parties on all sides of a contested issue, Rebecca Speer applies her deep expertise and experience to adjudicating disputes involving complaints of discrimination, harassment, retaliation, and wrongful termination. As with investigations, Rebecca applies analytical rigor, thoroughness, impartiality, unassailable integrity, and a commitment to a fair process to efficiently help parties achieve full closure to their dispute.
our clients
Speer Associates brings a thoughtful, experienced, and innovative approach to the people side of the country's most creative and influential organizations. We serve clients across industries from offices based in San Francisco, California. Clients include Fortune 100 and 500 companies, emerging companies, world-renowned universities, professional firms, public entities, and large not-for-profit organizations.