AVOIDING WORKPLACE DISPUTES & TRIBUNALS

Workplace Employment disputes grievances & tribunals claims are expensive. They need to be avoided. This training reduces problems & helps evidence the employers adherence to good practice.

#Employment #workplace #disputes #grievances and #tribunals usually arise due to a lack of clarity or understanding of employment law, policies and procedures or just unreasonable behaviour.

Ensuring Managers are properly trained helps significantly

Unreasonable behaviour may be on the part of the employer or employee or sometimes both. Much of employment law is underpinned by the principles of ‘fairness‘ and ‘reasonableness‘ and the question “what is reasonable, practical and proportionate?” is threaded into our training course as profiled below.

Individual employment rights have really increased in recent years and likely to increase still further; with these increases comes the associated increase in risk that employers will need to deal with an increase in grievance issues and potentially employment tribunal claims. Consequently it is important that all companies, businesses, organisations be they private, public or not for profit take every effort to ensure their managers, systems and procedures are sufficiently well developed to firstly minimise the risk of problems occurring, secondly to diffuse issues, quickly, if they arise and thirdly provide a robust defence if matters escalate to #ACAS or a #tribunal

Clearly, the best way of minimising the risk of tribunal claims is to have a workforce that is completely engaged, happy and content in their duties and persuaded about real prospects of career development. In the real world however, even with the best will in the world, problems will inevitably arise and the procedures, processes and management skills need to be in place before they do.

A good starting point is to strike the right balance between rights and responsibilities. This is best achieved with clear terms of employment, policies and procedures setting out what each party expects (and is entitled to receive) from the other – whether that be salary and benefits from the employer or performance and conduct to the required standard from the employee.

Periodic training is very important as employment law is constantly changing and new legislation is often misunderstood. In some cases, employers are totally unaware of the existence of the legislation. Ignorance of the law is never a valid defence. Ignorance of an offence is not a defence. Ignorance usually proves very costly in money and damaged reputation!

At the end of the day, to successfully defend an employment tribunal claim, an employer will need to satisfy the court that it acted within the #law.

Being able to evidence regular refresher #training for managers can be a big help.

Image:
"Three women hold signs at the Merchandise Mart in Atlanta, Georgia, urging people not to buy Judy Bond blouses, March 1, 1962" by Kheel Center used under CC BY-SA 2.0