Preparing for the worst

In the past two years I have seen grievance processes have a significant impact on two organisations with fewer than 10 people. As grievances are only formalised after efforts have been made to resolve them informally, the use of a grievance procedure usually indicates that a serious problem has arisen – and often it will have become very personal. It’s stressful and often adversarial, and in a small organisation impacts everyone, distracting those involved from day-to-day business and taking up time. Delivery is affected when key people involved are no longer able to work effectively together because of the grievance situation, and after the event it takes more time for everyone to recover.

In a large organisation it’s relatively easy to implement a structured grievance procedure and create space between the managers involved initially in hearing the grievance and those who hear any subsequent appeals. But what do you do when there are only half a dozen of you in the first place? ACAS provide a sample grievance procedure for small organisations. They recommend that “Management and employee representatives who may be involved in grievance matters should be trained for the task. They should be familiar with the provisions of the grievance procedure and know how to conduct or represent at grievance hearings”. ACAS also recommends in its code of conduct that “Employers should carry out necessary investigations to establish the facts of the case.” But when grievances are taken out against the chief executive, director or senior manager in a small organisation, it will fall to the board to receive the grievance, investigate it and ensure it is either resolved or not-upheld. Yet few board members are skilled in conducting an investigation appropriately and it’s not a normal part of a board induction process to be trained to do this.

A badly run grievance process erodes trust, which takes time to rebuild. I’ve seen well-meaning but ill-equipped board members get it very wrong, resulting in them turning a formal grievance investigative interview into an interrogation of issues unrelated to the grievance and taking sides, unable to remain impartial. Proceedings were inappropriately documented, the process was halted unresolved, and eventually it had to be started from scratch several months later. In another case there was confusion about what constituted appropriate cause for grievance. Inexperience resulted in a sort of organisational paralysis: the grievance seemed to take precedence over everything else for the several months it took to be resolved. Both organisations now thrive, but the organisations, the individuals involved in the grievances and the wider staff teams were all damaged by the process, and their leaders still feel the impact of this experience. Overall, both directors estimate that well over a hundred management and board person-hours were devoted to these cases directly and indirectly. In neither of these cases was there a practicing HR professional on the board or retained by the organisation, and reflections after the event include realisations that some errors had been made in recruitment in the first place, and that “ACAS is irrelevant if you can’t have a difficult conversation.”

The board is the employer, but board members often have little understanding of their responsibilities in this regard. Chairs need to be able to lead on good practice, and organisations need more than the basic policy. One director said it would have been a great deal easier if the board had had a clear plan of action attached to that policy, so that debate would have been unnecessary and things would have been resolved faster and at much less cost. In both cases professional HR support was eventually contracted to advise and conduct the grievance process.

Grievance is not a playing field for amateurs. The majority of arts organisations are just too small to accommodate the disruption that a mishandled case brings, so bite the bullet early and spend some money on getting it right first time. Make sure you have access to professional HR advice as soon as a formal grievance is raised and if needs be, pay professionals to undertake the process on your behalf or at the very least guide you in real time through it.

I am not an HR professional. My interest is in working with organisations strategically. As the sector is forced to diversify its sources of income and becomes more business-like, it needs to be more and more prepared to pay for professional advice and services. If you retain access to HR professionals as a matter of course it’s likely that the cost is balanced by the reduction in time needed by the senior team to manage HR events of this kind. That local lawyer on your board may not be enough in the future – unless of course they specialise in employment law!

Gill Thewlis is Director of the coaching and mentoring consultancy Aperté.