Why it’s important to appeal your grievance outcome if it’s unsatisfactory

Redmans Solicitors
September 12, 2013

In this post we’re going to take a look at why it’s important to appeal your grievance outcome if the outcome is unsatisfactory to you. There’s three main reasons why you may wish to appeal your grievance outcome:

It’s possible that an appeal may resolve your grievance satisfactorily if the initial grievance was rejected
If you pursue a claim in the Employment Tribunal then an adverse inference may be drawn by the fact that you didn’t appeal
If, again, you pursue a claim in the Employment Tribunal then your compensation may be reduced for a failure to comply with the ACAS Code

Resolution

The intrinsic purpose of an appeal process is to allow the aggrieved person an opportunity to yet again present their grievances to a person in a position of authority, with this person normally being (if possible) in a higher position of authority than the person who made the initial decision on the grievance. This route should be the first port of call if you’re unhappy with your grievance instead of reversion to legal action as it may be possible to satisfactorily resolve your grievance through the appeal process.

If you wish to submit a grievance to your employer then please feel free to use this grievance letter template

Adverse inference

If you do make a claim to the Employment Tribunal then a failure to have submitted an appeal to your grievance (if your grievance forms part or the whole of the basis of your claim) may cause you problems – the Employment Tribunal will inevitably be curious as to why, if your grievance was such an important issue, you neglected to attempt to resolve the matter internally before reverting to legal action. Although this may not determine the case itself, it’s useful to try and prevent such avoidable attacks on the prospects of success of your claim.

ACAS Code

Again, if you’ve submitted an Employment Tribunal claim then a failure to submit an appeal to your grievance may (if the grievance issue is central to your claim) mean that your compensation is reduced (should you be successful in your claim). The Employment Tribunal has the power to reduce the compensatory award by up to 25% if it is felt that you have unreasonably failed to comply with the ACAS code by not submitting a grievance appeal. The key issue here is the “reasonableness” of not submitting the grievance appeal – did you have a good reason for not doing so which is supported by evidence?

Chris Hadrill, an employment solicitor at Redmans, said: “Although this may not be true in all circumstances, it’s generally a good idea to appeal your grievance outcome if it’s unsatisfactory – even if you don’t believe that you’ll achieve anything by doing so. You can be assured that if you don’t appeal then you are potentially storing up problems for the future and, at it’s core, you are ignoring (even the small) possibility that your grievance could be resolved internally.

Redmans Solicitors are employment law solicitors and unfair dismissal solicitors