Discrimination & Harassment

Increasingly individuals have protection from discrimination.  The relatively established protection from race and sex discrimination are about to be amended, whilst relative newcomer, disability discrimination is changing too.    There is precious little case law on religious or sexual orientation discrimination and most managers would not necessarily recognise some of the more subtle forms of discrimination if it was laid out in front of them.

Most individuals do not really understand the issues in any great depth - and why would they?  Managers have business and units to manage, and individuals have a job to do.  It can take years to build up the expertise needed to ask the right questions, look at the right issues.  Most people have simply not spent that much time thinking about these issues.

Irenicon can help you in a number of ways.             

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Employees - click here

Employers

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.

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 :

briefing programmes/training - we can use our discrimination programmes  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; [link to training page]
      structure the process 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.   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.
help plan for the future, bearing in mind that often the complainant continues to work for the organisation.
defend employment tribunal claims if necessary. 

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 of support 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 and consulting terms.  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

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!

A common support option is for us to stand 'behind' you, helping you ask the relevant questions, discover the appropriate documents and make your case for yourself in the clearest possible terms.