Grievances: a Step by Step Guide

Are you an employer that has found yourself faced with a grievance from an employee? In our latest video, Chris Scobie outlines the steps you should take when handling a grievance.

What do employers need to do when an employee raises a grievance? By law, employers must have a grievance policy in place as a mechanism for dealing with employee complaints. Grievance policies are useful in that they set out what an employee needs to do if they have a complaint and also guide the employer in dealing with the complaint. The hope is that once the grievance is investigated and discussed, a resolution can be found. Should the employee’s grievance escalate into an Employment Tribunal claim, the Tribunal will want to see that the employer followed a fair grievance procedure. Indeed, a failure to follow a grievance procedure can lead to any compensatory award made to the employee being increased by up to 25%. Likewise, should the employee unreasonably fail to follow their employer’s grievance procedure, the award can be decreased by up to 25%.

In the event that you receive a grievance from an employee (for example about their treatment by another employee or about not being promoted), it’s important that you follow any procedure that it sets out. Your policy should explain, step by step, the process to be followed when a grievance is raised. In general though, there are five steps involved:

Assuming you have a policy in place (and if you don’t you need to put one in place quickly or, as a minimum, follow the ACAS code on disciplinary and grievance procedures, available on the ACAS website), review the procedure set out in your policy to ensure you understand and are going to be able to follow it.

Having a policy in place ensures uniformity and consistency across your business when dealing with any complaints and can bring to light any potential issues ahead of time.

When you receive a grievance, it should contain a brief description of the nature of the complaint, including any relevant facts, dates and the names of the individuals involved. If it doesn’t, you should ask for further information to ensure you have a proper understanding of the nature of the grievance. Once you’ve received the grievance, you should acknowledge it and give a timeline for a response (which might be set out already in your policy – it’s usually around five days).

Most grievances will require a certain amount of investigation by the employer to check the veracity of its contents, and to understand the context. Generally, the investigation takes place before you meet the complaining employee for the Grievance Hearing. However, it may be that your investigation happens after you’ve had an initial Hearing with the complaining employee to gather further facts. But in either case, you should take statements from any witnesses, if appropriate, and gather any other evidence you believe is relevant to the grievance (e.g. emails and other documentary evidence). The employee who raised the grievance should fully cooperate with the investigation to allow to Company to make findings in relations to the facts.

Once the investigation is complete, a Hearing should be held with the employee to discuss the findings of your investigation, to go through the content of the grievance against the context of the investigation and to discuss the way in which the employee would like to see the matter resolved. The Hearing should be held in a timely manner, and you must give the employee adequate notice of the meeting. You should also inform them of their right to be accompanied to that meeting by either a trade union rep or a colleague.

The Hearing is a chance for the employee to provide and explain any evidence they have and it gives the employer a chance to ask questions and provide any information that has arisen via the investigation.

It may be necessary to carry out a further investigation following the Hearing. If not, and you have enough information to make a decision, you should do so taking time to consider the facts, all the evidence you have seen/heard and how matters similar to the grievance have been dealt with in the past. The decision should be put in writing and therefore you should write to the employee after the Hearing to inform them of the outcome. The timescale for this is usually a week but again it depends on what your grievance policy says. The letter should confirm whether the grievance is upheld or not (or partially upheld) and also note the action that the Company will be taking following the grievance, if any. You should remind the employee in the letter of their right to appeal the outcome of the grievance and let them know how to do this. Generally, this involves a letter or email from the employee setting out their grounds of appeal within a short period of receiving the outcome (usually a week, depending on what your policy says).