There will be few in HR who have not at some time been served with one of those employee grievances which says, paraphrasing only slightly, “I am really unhappy in my work. I have recently discovered that I have been really unhappy for many years. Clearly this cannot be my fault in any way, so it must be yours. To prove that, I attach a twenty-page list of all the knocks and disappointments which I have been subjected to here over the last decade. I await your resolution, though I am not going to tell you what I think that should be“. Something in you just falls on its tiny face and dies – are you really going to have to investigate the whole lot? When you are drawing up your map of what you need to know, can you take no short-cuts?
Acas guidance, not to mention good ER practice, requires that your investigation is conducted reasonably. To help frame that, we can go back to the statutory purpose of a grievance procedure in section 3 ERA 1996 – to provide a mechanism by which an employee can “seek redress” for his complaint – in other words, to get something fixed or remedied. By extension from there, a complaint which cannot reasonably be fixed or remedied is not a good subject for a grievance, and still less so for any extended investigation. Perhaps the complaint relates to matters too long ago (ET limitation periods are not determinative here, but are certainly relevant) or impossible to investigate due to staff turnover or data deletion policies, or irrelevant to the...
On Tuesday, an X account attributed to a Texas man named Zyron Lewis posted a video of Lewis claiming that in 2012, when he was a middle school student, he was sexually assaulted by James Talarico...