HR Case Intake Triage

An employee concern arrives — a message, a hallway remark written down, a form submission. Turn it into one category, one urgency level, and one handling path, and name the fact that set the path. A capable model can summarize the complaint, but by default it triages the way the complainant framed it: if the person says "I don't want to make a big deal of this, just keep it between us," the model routes a harassment or discrimination allegation to a quiet coaching chat — which is exactly the failure that exposes the employer. It also treats "serious" and "urgent" as the same axis, and it swings between calling every unhappy employee a harassment case and dismissing a protected-class complaint as ordinary friction.

When to activate

Activate when the input is an inbound employee complaint or concern and the ask is how to classify or route it — "an employee reported that…", "how should we handle this concern", "what category and how urgent is this".

Do not activate to write the contemporaneous incident record for the file, to draft a PIP or a warning letter, or to answer a "what does our policy say about X" lookup.

The two things that decide the path

Score every intake on two independent axes, then pick the path.

Axis 1 — Category. The subject matter of the concern:

| Category | Examples | |---|---| | Harassment | Unwanted sexual attention, slurs, demeaning conduct tied to who a person is | | Discrimination | Adverse treatment tied to a protected class — race, sex, age, religion, disability, pregnancy, national origin, and the like | | Retaliation | Adverse action because the person reported something, took leave, or raised a concern | | Safety / violence | Threats, physical danger, weapons, a hazardous condition, self-harm | | Pay / hours | Missing wages, unpaid overtime, misclassification | | Management / interpersonal | Rudeness, favoritism, poor communication, a personality clash, workload | | Policy / benefits / ops | A question about a rule, PTO, enrollment, a form |

Axis 2 — Urgency. How fast someone must act, set by risk of harm, not by category:

| Urgency | Meaning | |---|---| | P0 — Immediate | Risk of physical harm now — a violence threat, a weapon, a hazard, self-harm intent. Act same hour. | | P1 — Same-day | Ongoing conduct still happening, or retaliation in progress. Open within the day. | | P2 — Standard | A specific past allegation with no active danger. Normal intake clock. | | P3 — Routine | An informational or policy/ops question. Route and answer. |

The path — and the rule the default gets wrong

Pick one path:

• MANDATORY INVESTIGATION — a trained investigator must look into it.
• COACHING / MANAGEMENT — a manager or HR partner addresses it as a performance or interpersonal matter.
• ROUTE / REFER — send to the right desk (payroll, benefits, EAP, policy) and answer.

The rule the model skips: any allegation of harassment, discrimination, retaliation, or a safety/violence threat is MANDATORY INVESTIGATION — and the complainant cannot waive it. "Please keep this confidential," "I don't want anyone to get in trouble," "just talk to them for me" changes how you communicate and how you protect the reporter — it does not downgrade the path. The duty is the employer's, not the employee's to release. Discretion about method never becomes discretion about whether to investigate.

The line between mandatory and coaching

This is where the default over- and under-triggers. Test each complaint against a protected class and against a legal trigger:

• Directed at everyone → coaching. Directed at a protected class → mandatory. "My manager yells at the whole team" is a management problem. "My manager only yells at the women" is sex discrimination — mandatory, even though the raw behavior sounds the same.
• Generalized unfairness is not a protected-class claim. "The schedule feels unfair," "he plays favorites," "I feel micromanaged" are coaching/management, not investigations — unless the favoritism tracks a protected class.
• Mild wording does not lower the category. "He keeps making little comments about my age" is an age-discrimination allegation, not a personality note. Grade the underlying claim, not how politely it was raised.
• Retaliation is about the sequence. If an adverse action (cut hours, a bad review, exclusion) followed the person raising a concern or taking protected leave, that timing itself is the trigger — investigate it as retaliation even if the first concern is old.

Output

State four things, plainly:

• Category — one from the list above.
• Urgency — P0–P3.
• Path — mandatory-investigation / coaching / route.
• Trigger — the specific fact that set the path (e.g., "unwanted sexual conduct alleged", "adverse review followed her complaint", "comments target her national origin", "no protected class — general management issue").

Example — A report comes in that a colleague repeatedly touches an employee's shoulders and remarks on her body, and she adds, "please don't make this official, I just need it to end." → Category: harassment · Urgency: P1 · Path: mandatory-investigation · Trigger: alleged unwanted sexual conduct — a mandatory category the reporter's confidentiality request cannot waive; honor the request in method (limit who knows), not in whether to investigate.

Edge cases

• "Keep it confidential." Protect the reporter and limit who learns of it — but a mandatory category still gets investigated. Confidentiality shapes the how, not the whether.
• Multiple issues in one message. Set the path on the most serious trigger present. "My manager is disorganized and made a comment about my pregnancy" is mandatory on the pregnancy line, whatever the rest is.
• Anonymous or thin report. A vague protected-class or safety allegation still opens an inquiry — you gather facts to assess it; thinness lowers confidence, not the duty.
• Complainant only wants advice, not action. For a mandatory category you can still support them and go at their pace on outreach, but the investigation obligation stands.
• Pure policy or benefits question. "How much PTO do I have," "how do I add a dependent" is route/refer at P3 — not every HR message is a case.
• Self-harm or a violence threat. P0 immediate regardless of category label — loop in safety/security and EAP the same hour, before the slower intake steps.