Letter rescheduling grievance meeting

Use our letter if you need to postpone a scheduled grievance meeting or if you’re agreeing to an employee’s own request to postpone. It’s reasonable to reschedule either if you need to do so for business reasons or if the employee has valid grounds for their postponement request, e.g. their companion isn’t available on the date proposed.

Acas Code of Practice

The Acas Code of Practice on Disciplinary and Grievance Procedures sets out the principles for handling grievances in the workplace. Where an employee has raised a formal grievance in writing, this includes holding a meeting with the employee to discuss their grievance. This meeting should be arranged without unreasonable delay after you receive the grievance - use our Notification of Grievance Meeting for this. You should both make every effort to attend the meeting and the employee should be allowed to explain their grievance and how they think it should be resolved. However, occasionally it may be necessary to postpone the grievance meeting and this could be at your behest or at the request of the employee. You can use our Letter Rescheduling Grievance Meeting in this scenario. It covers two potential postponement circumstances.

Business need

The first is where you need to postpone the meeting due to unforeseen business circumstances. However, don’t use this lightly, i.e. make sure there’s an essential business reason in play. You don’t want to give your employee any ammunition to argue that your grievance process is unfair. Our letter sets out a new date and time for the meeting, states that the purpose of the meeting is still to allow the employee to explain their grievance and discuss how it could be resolved and confirms that the postponement won’t in any way affect the conduct of the meeting or its outcome.

Employee’s request

Secondly, our letter provides for a postponement of the grievance meeting at the employee’s own request. Under the legislation, if the employee’s chosen companion is not available at the time you originally proposed for the meeting, the employee can suggest an alternative reasonable time which is within five working days of the original date that you proposed. Other valid reasons why an employee may request a postponement include genuine illness, annual leave, to obtain legal advice, etc. They may even want to postpone because they’re still putting together a file of evidence to support their grievance. It’s advisable to allow at least one postponement here if the employee’s reasons seem valid.