Best laid plans

Both employer and employee will soon have to show they have followed statutory disciplinary and grievance procedures. But will they help or hinder HR? Compiled by Phil Boucher.

Sue Griffin
Head of employee relations, Ceridian Centrefile

I think the Employment Act 2002 will help because it brings home the importance of following procedure. It will help companies to pick up issues at an early stage and implement a disciplinary policy as a phased approach - rather than letting things come to a head like many people do now. If a person or company wants to go down the grievance route, then they will now have to show a lot more patience.

At the same time, it's also good that the Act makes disciplinary procedures a statutory concern. Tribunals will now have very little sympathy for any firm that fails to follow the right procedure. I think that large companies that fail to toe the line, and consequently get an automatic unfair dismissal, will have only themselves to blame.

The Act has to be careful it doesn't penalise people who have to act swiftly when a misconduct issue occurs. It shouldn't penalise those who are trying to make decisions on the spot and act under pressure. The right balance has to be struck between common sense and procedures.

Despite this, I think the changes are positive. The big difference is that it now requires employees to follow the procedure as well. Until now there has often been an issue that employees don't think applies to them. In some cases an individual's appeal will succeed even if people haven't followed procedure - which is unfair. Now it is far more two sided; both employer and employee will have to show they have tried to solve the problems internally and followed the correct steps before a dispute gets to tribunal.

This means HR now has to ensure management and employees understand and remain within the guidelines at all times. One downside is that HR will now be more hesitant to let managers manage on their own. In the past, HR has given autonomy by publicising the policy and giving management easy guidelines to handle the processes. Now we may have to go back to being more hands on.

Much of this may involve hand-holding of managers to make sure they are managing performance in an exemplary way - and I'm certain HR will want to be involved earlier in the proceedings. This will mean more work for HR, although many will want to devolve authority to managers and trust them to manage it as well.

It is because of this that a large part of Ceridian's company-wide management development is now focused on employee legislation, performance management and the law relating to it - in particular, emphasising this new legislation and pushing it hard so that all managers know their responsibilities.

Mike Young
HR director UK & Ireland, Avaya

It's good to have documented procedures so everyone knows where they stand. But they will have to be sufficiently flexible so that the merit of the case is given higher priority than simply following the correct procedure in the first place. Too often firms find they are on the wrong end of tribunal decisions because of technicalities in the legal procedure. And unfortunately, experience tells me that's the way this Act is likely to go too.

The Act is likely to help staff. We are non-unionised and it will help employees to know how to pursue a grievance if they have one. It is also a two-way thing: we want to hear if there are problems for individuals, and want people to feel they have a way of addressing these without fear.

Len Aspell
Head of employee relations, HSBC

The new regulations will not make things easier for all employers. Some will have to follow set procedures for the first time, and account for the consequences for not doing so. Others will have to spend time and resources reviewing their procedures and training HR to cope with the impact of the regulations. Tribunals may also lose out. The regulations' aim is to enable more disputes to be resolved internally. However, it is likely more litigation will follow than ever before over failure to follow the detailed procedures. As a result, tribunal decisions will be heavily influenced by legal technicalities rather than the actual issues of the case in hand.

Hopefully, in time, the impact of the regulations will be to make more employers aware that they must have procedures in place to deal with disciplinary matters and grievances and it will encourage them to use them.

Rob Barnett
Director of HR, policy and service, B&Q

As with all similar changes, the Employment Act represents an opportunity as well as a challenge, and we have taken the opportunity to update our training and review our current grievance procedure as a result.

But like most employers, we are waiting for the regulations to be completed before we finalise our arrangements. We believe the improvements we are making will help us to continue to deal with disciplinary and grievance matters fairly and reasonably.

Despite this, we are concerned the new proposals could actually cause more tribunals. The regulations have many grey areas that are open to interpretation, and these may overshadow the overall merits of cases.

One change will be to employees who have less than six months' service where, historically, a simpler procedure was applied.

Heather Mayes
Senior HR adviser, Powergen

If the Acas code of conduct had been more closely applied we wouldn't need this at all. But it will help to reduce the numbers of cases that progress to tribunal as it will encourage people to talk about any issues that arise internally. But like a lot of measures that have come out recently, it is mainly aimed at small and medium-sized businesses as larger companies have already got well-established grievance procedures in place.

For smaller companies, it may be a good way of reducing costs as it puts the focus on resolution where it needs to be - between employer and employee. Now the procedure has been given more formality and is easier to understand, they are likely to think more carefully about the issues involved.

But as the Act is out for consultation, it will be interesting to see what the final version looks like.