The Role of HR in difficult or complex cases

Consider the following cases

Case 1 - A manager has a series or longer terms absences over the course of 12 months resulting in them only being at work for 5 months in total over the past year

Case 2 - A manager fails to report a health and safety issue which could have resulted in significant harm coming to a vulnerable person in their care. A disciplinary warning is issued, however there is concern that the manager did not recognise their duty to report this.

Case 3 - A performance issue has been identified with a manager and performance plan put in place.

Case 4 - The organisation recently received a number of grievances from a particular team. The grievances are not about the manager of the team, however they both cite the manager as a contributing factor for failing to deal with the perceived issues.

What would you do?

Case 1 - Most organisation have a policy for managing absence, and this should be followed. In general, this will follow either a capability process where targets are put in place for attendance or a disciplinary process where warnings are issued as absence increases. This should be managed through the organisations processes.

Case 2 - From the information above, it would appear that this has been managed through the disciplinary process correctly and a warning issued due to misconduct - failing to follow the organisation’s processes. The issue around whether they accepted the severity of the situation and their duty to report can be monitored and with a warning in place can be escalated if it re-occurs. There could also have been a conversation around capability at this point as the individual might not have understood their role or been clearly trained on it.

Case 3 - A performance plan with timescales and targets would seem like an appropriate course of action for this employee. This would need have some set targets, responsibilities and a timescale attached to it. A capability process should give employees appropriate time to meet the targets, but not be so long that an issue persists for a long period of time.

Case 4 - Investigating the grievances would be a starting point to this. This is important to be done quickly and effectively to ensure that actions are taken at the appropriate time.

 The role of HR

In large organisations, there can be multiple people involved in dealing with the above issues are teams can be large and spans of control can cover many areas. The cases above all related to the same employee with different managers dealing with different parts of the process due to where they had been raised and where the responsibility sat for them.

HR should be in a position to recognise that one person is involved in all of the above cases, and it is not a straightforward case of a disciplinary, grievance, capability or absence management, but actually an employee who, at this point in time, is not meeting the needs of the organisation in multiple ways. The ability to take a step back and look at the bigger picture is an important part of the HR Department’s function.

As each element above had been treated almost in isolation, no one manager had all the information required to make an informed decision about the person’s overall conduct and capability to continue in their role.

HR should bring all the information together and involve the right people in the decision making process to allow solutions to be found earlier and not allow things to escalate to the point above. This could have been through earlier intervention to put plans in place sooner or, when things reached a critical point, advising managers of the wider options available to them as there were a number of ways in which, taken as a whole, the issues could have resulted in a termination of employment.

How can I help?

I have significant experience across a number of organisations in supporting managers in dealing with difficult situations and getting the required outcome and reducing the risk of the situation escalating. Often issues can be solved informally, but sometimes things have already reached a critical point and require some careful thought and actions to resolve. 

Services I can provide:

-          Problem solving – Coming into the organisation to support for a particular problem

-          Line Manager Training – Working on a series of common HR issues with line managers using the organisations own policies and procedures to give everyone the confidence to use the procedures when required.  These sessions can be in person or online and can be tailored to cover purely the process, the people skills, tools and techniques or a combination of both.

-          Policy and Procedure writing – I can create a suite of people policies that are compliant with legislation and meet the needs of the organisation and help launch, raise awareness and train on the new or updated policies.