The Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) overturns an Employment Tribunal’s decision to apply a 100% Polkey deduction to an unfair dismissal claim.
In this recent judgment, the EAT has overturned an Employment Tribunal (ET) decision which reduced the compensatory award made to a Claimant in a successful unfair dismissal claim by 100%. The EAT also cast doubt over the fairness of a performance management model which requires employees to be ready for promotion to the next level of seniority, a model often referred to as “up or elsewhere”.
The Claimant, Ms Pal, worked as a Manager for the Respondent Accenture (UK) Ltd, a management consultancy firm. Ms Pal worked in the Talent and Organisation practice group and had been promoted twice since she commenced work in 2009. Firstly, she was promoted from an Analyst to a Consultant in 2011, and then again to a Manager in 2013.
Accenture operates a progression-based performance model, whereby it expects its employees to be continuously developing towards the next level of seniority in the career model. Under this model if staff are not working at the next level, then they are deemed to be underperforming. Performance is assessed by Accenture twice yearly and if an employee is deemed to be underperforming, they are given an outcome of “Not Progressing”. Although the Respondent argued that this performance model was standard across the consulting industry, it is fairly unusual outside of this sphere. Usually, an employee’s...
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