Don’t grieve unnecessarily

One of the (many) unfortunate consequences of the Dispute Resolution regime is that it encourages employees to raise formal grievances about everything in sight, even – in fact particularly – after they have decided that they can’t solve their workplace problems by talking to their employer and are going to have to bring an employment tribunal claim.

To an extent, while the regime is still in force (as it will be until April 2009 at the earliest), this is unavoidable: most employment tribunal claims apart from complaints of dismissal must be preceded by internal grievances, or the tribunal won’t have jurisdiction to hear them.

That’s bad enough – it means that everyone concerned has to write letters and attend meetings that are not much more than a dress rehearsal for the tribunal. Fat wodges of paper are created that have to be included in the bundle for the tribunal, and that lawyers or representatives will have to read, but which will rarely be of much interest to anyone when it comes to a hearing.

Try not to make this problem worse by raising more grievances than you need to to found your claim. Cases aren’t won by boring the tribunal into submission. Everyone involved in your case will get tired and fretful if they have to wade through endless pages of grievances about matters not capable of founding a claim, appeals against the employer’s decision about who is to conduct the grievance, grievances about the manner in which the employer has conducted that appeal, further grievances about the manner in which the previous grievance about how the first grievance was conducted were conducted – and so on.

Very occasionally the conduct of a grievance will itself amount to an actionable claim. But much more often – even if you feel angry about the way the grievance has been conducted – it will be better to draw a line under the internal grievance and take your complaint to the employment tribunal instead.