Letter offering options for a grievance meeting

Where an employee is signed off on long-term sick leave having raised a grievance, there will come a point where you need to progress that grievance to its conclusion. Use our letter to do this.

Fair procedure

An employee might raise a grievance and then be signed off sick or they may raise that grievance whilst they’re already on sick leave. Either way, you’d normally hold off arranging a grievance meeting until the employee is well enough to attend it. If you’d already arranged it before they went off sick, you can use our Letter Rescheduling Grievance Meeting to rearrange it for a later date. If the employee’s sickness absence is only going to be short term (for example, a week or two), then it’s reasonable to simply wait to hold the grievance meeting until they’re fit to return to work. However, if it’s looking like their absence is going to be somewhat longer than that, you must balance their need for time off to recover their health against your obligation under the Acas Code of Practice on Disciplinary and Grievance Procedures to arrange for a grievance meeting to be held “without unreasonable delay”. So, at this point it would be fair to explore alternative options to enable the meeting to go ahead.

Alternative options

There are four main alternative options here:

1. Hold the grievance meeting at the employee’s home or otherwise on external premises (i.e. neutral territory) away from the workplace.
2. Hold the meeting either by telephone or through a video call.
3. Allow the employee to submit a written statement explaining their grievance in more detail, and how they think it should be resolved, if they feel they’re not fit enough to attend a meeting in person.
4. Allow them to send along a representative to act on their behalf at the meeting if again they think they’re not fit to attend personally - the starting point is for this to be a work colleague or trade union official or representative as these fall within the statutory right to be accompanied, but there’s nothing to stop you being as fair as possible and extending this to a close family relative, such as a parent, spouse, partner, child, brother or sister. The fairer you’re seen to be, the more it could strengthen your defence if the employee later resigns following the grievance process and claims constructive dismissal in relation to that process.

Our Letter Offering Options for a Grievance Meeting refers to the fact that the meeting has already been postponed once or twice due to the employee’s ongoing sickness absence and it goes on to offer the above four options. It then asks the employee to confirm which option they’re willing to accept by a set deadline (give them at least a week to reply), failing which it states that you’ll have no choice but to rearrange the meeting anyway, warning them that it’s then likely to go ahead in their absence.