Raising a Grievance: Are You Trying to Repair the Relationship or End It?
I've written before about the rise of AI-written grievances landing on employers' desks, ten pages of formatted complaints that a chatbot produced in thirty seconds, which you can read my thoughts on here. However, length isn't the thing I want to talk about today - we need to talk about the intent of a grievance.
Before you raise anything, ask yourself an honest question. Do you want to carry on working here, and do you want it to be bearable? Because your answer changes everything about how you should approach this.
If your goal is to see the person you've complained about disciplined or dismissed, that outcome is not yours to have. Disciplinary action against a colleague is confidential. You will almost never be told what happened, and you will not be part of it. So if getting them "in trouble" is the win you’re aiming for, you're likely to walk away feeling the process failed you, even when it didn't.
Relationships become very fragile during a formal grievance. Once it's in writing, once managers and HR are involved, the temperature in the room changes and it rarely comes back down quickly. If you want to stay and you want things to improve, going in combative will only work against you.
So get clear on what you actually want. Not vengeance, but an actual constructive outcome. Whether this be an apology, an explanation, clarification of a decision or a change in how something is handled going forward. These are things that can very often be sorted informally, with a conversation, without putting the whole working relationship under strain.
This matters more than ever right now. ACAS has published a draft update to its Code of Practice, the first full revision since 2009, and it puts real weight on resolving concerns informally before anything goes formal. One proposed change asks workers to say, at the point of raising a written grievance, how they'd like the concern resolved. That is exactly the question I'm asking you to answer for yourself first. The draft is out for consultation until September, so it isn't law yet, but the direction of travel is clear. As a HR professional, if a formal grievance lands in my inbox, I always ask the employee what difference the outcome will make to them by making it formal.
None of this is to say grievances are never the right route. Sometimes the relationship has genuinely broken down and sometimes the behaviour is serious enough that informal simply won't cut it. Sometimes people raise one to get someone sacked, to secure a payout, or because they're too angry to see a way back, and occasionally there are legitimate reasons to want out.
Before you raise a grievance though, be honest with yourself about which one you're in. A grievance raised to end a relationship and a grievance raised to repair one need completely different approaches, and confusing the two is how people end up worse off than when they started.
If you're staying, aim for bearable. Be clear, be concise, ask for the specific thing that would actually help, as you'd be surprised how often that's enough. If you’re considering raising a grievance, you can download my template here, but you can also book in a free confidential discovery call with me to see how I can support you before you decide on the your steps.
