Handling discipline and grievance issues

Discipline and grievance procedures and the employment contract

You can choose whether to include disciplinary and grievance procedures in the employment contract. However, if you do and you fail to follow the procedures, you will be in breach of the contract. The procedures should be included in the written statement, or in a separate document - like the staff handbook - which should be referred to in the written statement.

See our guide on the employment contract .

The legal position

It is now a legal requirement that you give your employees a written statement of your dismissal, disciplinary, and grievance procedures. These procedures must reflect new minimum statutory requirements. Failure to provide these documents to your employees may result in an employee being awarded two or four weeks' pay if they succeed with an employment tribunal claim against you.

When thinking about dismissal or relevant disciplinary action you must follow the statutory procedure. Failure to do so will usually result in one of the following:

• a dismissal could be held to be automatically unfair
• if you take some sort of disciplinary action other than dismissal against an employee, a tribunal will usually award increased compensation for that action

You must also:

• Include in employees' written statements of employment the name of the person to whom they should apply if they are unhappy about a disciplinary, dismissal or grievance decision.
• Allow any worker who is required or invited to attend certain types of non-trivial disciplinary and grievance hearing to be accompanied by a fellow worker, ie another person in your workforce, or trade union official of their choice. This is a statutory right and should you fail, or threaten to fail, to comply with this right then a worker may present a complaint to an employment tribunal.

Subjects covered in this guide

• Introduction
• Discipline and grievance procedures and the employment contract
• Setting out disciplinary rules
• The disciplinary and dismissals procedure
• Investigating disciplinary matters
• Preparing for a disciplinary hearing
• Holding a disciplinary hearing
• Types of disciplinary action
• The grievance procedure
• Handling a grievance
• Appeals against disciplinary/grievance decisions

 

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