Letter notifying outcome of harassment complaint

If an employee has lodged a formal complaint related to alleged harassment under your dignity at work policy, once your investigation is complete, you should let them know the outcome and outline any actions you’re taking in response.

Harassment complaint

Our Dignity at Work Policy includes a section on reporting complaints which sets out the procedure to be followed by an employee to formally report a harassment or bullying complaint and by you to deal with it. Alternatively, the employee may choose to use your Grievance Procedure to lodge their complaint, in which case you can either deal with it as a grievance or seek their consent to instead adopt the procedure set out in your dignity at work policy on the basis that procedure has been specifically drafted to tackle harassment and bullying allegations. Whichever procedure you do use, the key is to ensure you fairly, sensitively and promptly investigate the allegations, set out your conclusions and then action any necessary next steps. You’re also now under a duty to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment of your employees in the course of their employment, which means you need to be proactive and put a range of measures in place to try and stop sexual harassment from happening in the first place. This makes it more important than ever that you have clear processes for reporting sexual and other types of harassment complaints (including ideally an option for anonymous reporting) and that you then effectively investigate and deal with those complaints.

Notifying the outcome

Our policy provides that, once your investigation is complete, the investigating manager will prepare a report and the employee will then be informed in writing of the outcome and of your decision as soon as possible, including what action, if any, is to be taken. This is the purpose of our Letter Notifying Outcome of Harassment Complaint. It sets out three possible outcomes. The first is that you uphold the employee’s complaint in full, in which case you also need to set out what action you’ll be taking in response to it and our letter enables you to do that. This might include, for example, instituting disciplinary proceedings against the accused employee for potential misconduct or gross misconduct and/or arranging for additional staff dignity at work training. The second is that you uphold only part of the employee’s complaint, so you should advise them what action you’ll be taking in response to the part that you upheld. The third is that you don’t uphold the complaint. In this scenario, our letter states that you won’t be taking any action in response to the complaint, but you will consider how best to manage the repair of the working relationship between the employee and the accused, e.g. through counselling or mediation. Do also set out the reasons for your decision, so that the employee can understand why you reached your conclusions. If the complaint is upheld and the accused remains in your employment following any disciplinary action, our policy provides that you’ll take all reasonable steps to ensure the employee doesn’t have to continue working alongside them if they don’t want to, so our letter mentions that too.

Right of appeal

Finally, our policy provides a right of appeal if the employee isn’t satisfied with the outcome of their complaint – this is to ensure compliance with the Acas Code of Practice on Disciplinary and Grievance Procedures, as the employee would have had an appeal right had they raised the complaint as a grievance. So, our letter includes that right of appeal.