Grievance

Literally, a grievance is “grounds for a complaint”. The word appears often in the context of employment with the word “procedure”. Employers in the UK are required to operate a “grievance procedure” for dealing with complaints by employees.

This web site has partly been inspired by the fact that individuals who contact my company Humane Resources Ltd, plus countless members of two internet forums I’ve subscribed to for many years, who have invoked their employers’ grievance procedures, have been subject to a process that superficially follows the procedure required by law, but which in practice does not. Although every one of these people has a different employer, the stories are all remarkably similar – so similar in fact that I am now convinced that while the process is unwritten, where it is applied it is applied in a uniform manner.

The effect of this process on employees who make their complaint is consistently bad. Their complaints are not upheld and the situation they complained about gets worse, to the point that they have to change jobs. If they don’t resign, then disciplinary proceedings can and do follow.

The process appears to be driven by three factors. Firstly, the employee’s complaint is about the behaviour or conduct of a more senior (or if not, more popular) employee, and it is a serious complaint. For example, the complainant might allege that they have been made ill with stress as a result of the behaviour. Once the complaint is aired, the subject of the complaint secures the loyalty of senior colleagues, who together appear to decide that the complainant is not to be believed. The third element is that employment law in the UK requires employers to be seen to follow a certain process when handling a complaint. The legal requirement of fairness conflicts with the desire to eliminate the complainant, and so follows a piece of theatre which is mainly conducted to impress an employment tribunal panel at a later date, should the need arise. The theatre is a superficially fair and proper grievance process, which actually is anything but fair or proper.

It is the legal requirement to take certain steps, and the way those steps are actually taken, that makes it relatively easy to see when the process is a sham.

I have to clarify at this point that this is not an undisputed fact, but my personal theory based upon cases I have heard about. I do not suppose for a moment that it reflects the methods of all employers in the UK – only the ones I hear about.

One insurmountable hurdle I would face if I were to research this in a conventional manner is that few if any employers would admit to operating such a scheme. A major aim of the process is to deny that the process exists. Therefore, I have to rely on what I am told by employees who are going through the process, and on what I have learned when I experienced it myself.

Through this web site and the community which I hope will grow here, I hope to conduct some scientific research which will confirm or dispel the belief that there is a standard unwritten and underhand procedure. If the belief is confirmed, I hope to be able to define it and publish it so that at least some of its victims are less unwitting than I was, and than so many of my clients were.

Until then, here are the main steps of the process as I understand them:

• Employee discovers they are ill through stress
  
• Employee realises cause of stress is bullying
  
• With no other options, employee writes grievance about bullying
  
• Investigation is biased and drawn out
  
• Outcome is “no evidence of bullying”
  
• Appeal confirms outcome
  
• Employee resigns, or is redeployed, or has ill health retirement
  
• Alleged bully is promoted.
  

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fireball said:

This article could actually be a carbon copy of a complaint I put to the Health and Safety Executive having represented countless individuals over the years through complaints of bullying and hara*sment and just plain unacceptable behaviour. The outcomes follow almost exclusively the pattern described and the outcomes are invariably an "Exit Strategy" (Employers terminology, not mine). Even when I actually proved that a member of HR was found not only to have lied but to have submitted a falsified document this was ignored and the outcome was the same - Exit Strategy. My reasons for bringing in HSE was the stress caused to these individuals as their complaints were drawn out anything up to two years (four in one case that is still not concluded)following the investigative process and I now realise had only one inevitable outcome. The Bullying and Hara*sment Procedure is merely the Grievance Procedure with no appeal stage. I now inform staff to avoid at all costs the use of the formal procedure and to merely stick to all possible means of the informal procedure. This means that there is no investigative process to follow - merely a series of meetings that have to be concluded before leaving. Although the procedures state that all informal procedures are to be exhausted before recourse to formal procedures they try to push complainants towards the formal because the formal procedures they can manipulate whereas the informal meetings are less predictable. Managers and HR Officers are out of their depth here with no foreseeable outcome. It is almost funny to see the frustration on their faces as they almost beg the complainant to take up a formal grievance only to be told that they do not consider that this would be helpful.

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October 07, 2008
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