Handling An Employee's Grievance: Grievance Procedure - GOV.UK

Cookies on GOV.UK

We use some essential cookies to make this website work.

We’d like to set additional cookies to understand how you use GOV.UK, remember your settings and improve government services.

We also use cookies set by other sites to help us deliver content from their services.

Accept additional cookies Reject additional cookies View cookies Hide cookie message Skip to main content

1. Home
2. Employing people
3. Dismissing staff and redundancies

Handling an employee's grievance Skip contents

Contents

1. Overview
2. Grievance procedure
3. The grievance hearing
4. Employers' decisions and appeals

Grievance procedure

By law, employers must set out a grievance procedure and share it in writing with all employees, for example, in their statement of employment or staff handbook. It must include:

• who the employee should contact about a grievance
• how to contact this person

It should also:

• say that if the problem cannot be resolved informally, there will be a meeting with the employee, called a grievance hearing
• set out time limits for each stage of the process
• identify who to contact if the normal contact person is involved in the grievance
• explain how to appeal a grievance decision
• state that employees can be accompanied in any meetings by a colleague or union representative
• outline what happens if a grievance is raised during disciplinary action

You do not have to include information about the grievance procedure in employment contracts. However, if you do, you must follow the procedure, or the employee could bring a breach of contract claim against you.

Acas Code of Practice

The Acas Code of Practice is not legally binding. However, an employment tribunal can reduce or increase any money awarded in a case by up to 25% if the code has not been followed.

You can find out more in the Acas Code of Practice on disciplinary and grievance procedures.

Previous:Overview Next:The grievance hearing View a printable version of the whole guide

Related content

• Being taken to an employment tribunal

Explore the topic

• Dismissing staff and redundancies

Elsewhere on the web

• Formal grievance procedure: step by step

Is this page useful?

• Yes this page is useful
• No this page is not useful

Thank you for your feedback Report a problem with this page

Help us improve GOV.UK

Don’t include personal or financial information like your National Insurance number or credit card details.

This field is for robots only. Please leave blank What were you doing? What went wrong? Send Cancel

Help us improve GOV.UK

To help us improve GOV.UK, we’d like to know more about your visit today. Please fill in this survey (opens in a new tab).

Cancel