Bullying & Harassment

Bullying and harassment can cause significant damage to the smooth working of a business unit, and to morale and productivity.

As well as the 'business cost', there can also be direct and substantial costs from legal claims.  If the bullying or harassment is based on an individual's gender, race, religion, sexual orientation or disability, then unlimited compensation can be awarded under the discrimination statutes.  If an individual resigns as a result of being bullied/harassed at work, it is highly likely that a constructive dismissal claim will follow.

Even if there is no unlawful discrimination element to the bullying and harassment, and even if the person does not resign, an individual can still claim compensation against the employer for harassment that is connected to their work under the Protection from Harassment Act.  Irenicon can help you in a number of ways.                           Subscribe to our free email newsletter

Employees - click here

Employers

Large scale grievances or grievances concerning discrimination or harassment can take a considerable amount of time and effort to investigate.   If you are not in the habit of questioning witnesses and considering differeng accounts of events, you can find yourself subject to criticism at an employment tribunal.   Even if you are, the time and resources devoted to this process may mean you are unable to move your business forward, since you have to abandon core activities to deal with this problem.  

Having carried out an initial investigation, you may find it difficult to arrive at a conclusion - current definitions of discrimination and harassment are not that easy to understand, and many a grievance 'officer' needs an intelligent friend with whom to discuss the options and implications of their thinking - someone who can be relied upon to spot the 'gaps' as well as the strong points.   What do you do when it is just one person's word against another? 

Should you require grievances to be proved in order to be upheld?   Does upholding a grievance automatically mean dismissal of the person who is the subject of a complaint?  What about confidentiality?   What happens if the investigation drags on for a long period of time?  Should you suspend the complainant?  Should you suspend the subject of the complaint?

You may want help to:

evaluate the initial complaint, and suggest lines of questioning and investigation;
read, collate and analyse conflicting statements (particularly useful in large-scale investigations);
assess the organisational risk against current case law, and your own commercial objectives;
draft all supporting paperwork from initial letters convening meetings, to letters giving outcomes

overload support - providing a full investigation and report service if you are too busy to undertake the process yourself

This service is designed to be flexible, and provide as much or as little support as you need. 

This can be done in a variety of ways, including meetings, advice by email and phone:

briefing programmes/training - we can use our bullying and harassment or grievance and appeal handling programmes as a real time planning round, to help line managers and HR arrive at consensus on how to proceed;
help structure the process, from initial scoping meeting to appeal outcomes;
provide correspondence to support the process at every stage;
advice by phone/fax/email/in person on the legal implications of what you discover,
providing policies and letters to support the process from electing arranging formal meetings, to questionnaires.   We can also draft compromise agreements;
provide an additional and experienced pair of hands/brain at a time when you may be bogged down in lengthy investigations, or not sure what to do.
handle any employment tribunal claims

An experienced consultant can save you hours of work, and give you the confidence to communicate clearly with staff, managers, directors, unions and elected representatives, as well as individual staff.  This confidential service can make a real difference to the results. This support can take anything from two hours to a week, depending on the scale needed.  The average amount of time expended on a medium scale project is ten hours.  We can provide more accurate quotations and assistance

We offer new clients an initial 20 minutes advice free of charge, so you can talk to us about your plans in confidence without immediately running up an expected bill! Click to see our fee rates.  Once your initial 20 minutes free advice has been used, you can pay securely online and take advantage of our prepayment rates, or open a credit account.

Employees

Are you the victim of Bullying & Harassment?  See our new free download page.

We work on an hourly rate basis.  We are not 'no win no fees' operators.   We take on only those cases where our client is likely to benefit from investing in our time.   We are successful in working for individuals in a wide variety of situations, but we do assess cases very carefully to avoid ending up with the individual owing us the same amount in fees as they gained from arguing!