Request to attend grievance investigation meeting

Where a grievance names other employees as witnesses, you should interview them as part of your grievance investigation.

Grievance witnesses

Where an employee raises a grievance against another employee, you should interview that other employee as part of a good grievance investigation, and you can arrange this using our Letter Informing Employee of Grievance Against Them. However, if the complainant’s grievance also names other employees whom they say are relevant witnesses to whatever acts their complaints relate to, you should formally interview all those witnesses too. This will enable you to assess the complainant’s grievance from the perspective of all the parties present or involved, in order to see whether there’s any merit to it.

Investigation meeting

Our Request to Attend Grievance Investigation Meeting can be used to arrange meetings with witnesses. It sets a date, time and location for the meeting and advises the witness that, following the meeting, you may either ask them to produce a signed witness statement, or ask them to sign a copy of the meeting minutes to confirm they represent a true account of the discussion. 

Disclosure and confidentiality

You should make clear to witnesses at the meeting that any evidence they give may subsequently have to be disclosed to the complainant, for example if the latter makes a data subject access request. You won’t need to disclose the full witness statement to the complainant though at the grievance meeting or when notifying the grievance outcome, but you may need to summarise it to properly explain the conclusions you’ve reached on the complainant’s grievance.

Although you should maintain confidentiality during the grievance process to the extent that it’s possible and appropriate in the circumstances, you will need to reveal the complainant’s identity and the broad nature of their grievance to relevant witnesses so that they can give meaningful witness statements. Don’t let them see the actual grievance letter though; it should be sufficient to provide a general summary which contains enough information about the part of the grievance that involves them to enable them to give their statement.