A grievance procedure for a company with no HR department

An employee comes into your cabin and says his supervisor has been singling him out. You listen, you say you will look into it, and you probably do. Three weeks later he has not heard anything, the supervisor has heard about the complaint from somewhere, and the employee is now certain that raising it was a mistake.

Nothing improper happened. You did look into it. But nothing about the process was written down, so the employee could not know it was happening, the supervisor learnt about it informally, and there is no record of what you concluded. The next person with a complaint will go to a colleague instead, and you will hear about it after they resign.

Two routes, kept separate

The commonest structural mistake is running everything through one process. A grievance and a disciplinary matter move in opposite directions and mixing them does real harm.

• A grievance is raised by an employee about their work, their treatment or their conditions. The company is responding to them.
• A disciplinary matter is raised by the company about an employee's conduct or performance. The company is acting on them.
• They must not share a form or a route. When a complainant is put through a process that feels like an investigation of themselves, they stop complaining — and so does everyone they tell.

What a small company actually needs

Not a manual. Four decisions, written on one page and told to everybody.

1. 1

   Who receives a complaint

   Name a role, and name an alternative that is not the person's own manager. This second name is the whole point: a complaint about a supervisor cannot be routed through that supervisor. In a company with no HR, the alternative is usually a founder or a specific senior person.

2. 2

   What happens within how long

   Acknowledged within a set number of working days, looked into within a further period, outcome communicated by a stated point. Write the numbers down and make them realistic, because a missed commitment is worse than a longer one.

3. 3

   What gets recorded

   What was raised, when, by whom, what was checked, what was decided and what was communicated. Half a page. This is what makes the second similar case consistent with the first.

4. 4

   What the employee is told at the end

   An outcome, in a conversation, even where the outcome is that no action is being taken. The single largest source of grievance about grievances is silence.

A one-page procedure

RAISING
  Any employee may raise a concern about their work, treatment
  or conditions. Verbally or in writing.
  Receive: <role>. Alternative if the concern involves that
  person or the employee's own manager: <named role>.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
  Within <N> working days, in writing, confirming what was
  understood and what happens next.

LOOKING INTO IT
  Within <N> working days. Speak to the people involved.
  Keep a written note of what each said.
  The person complained about is told what has been raised
  and given a chance to respond.

OUTCOME
  Communicated to the employee in a conversation, then in
  writing. An outcome of 'no further action' is still an
  outcome and is still communicated.

IF THE EMPLOYEE IS NOT SATISFIED
  One review, by <named role>, whose decision closes it.

RECORD
  Held by <role>, separately from the employee's personnel
  file, accessible to <named roles> only.

One review stage, not three. Small companies that copy a large-company procedure with multiple appeal levels end up with a process nobody completes.

The part most people get wrong

Telling the person complained about. It feels like escalation, and the instinct is to look into it quietly first. But a supervisor who learns from the floor that a complaint was made about them will behave worse, not better — and the complainant is the one who pays for it.

Tell them what has been raised, in a controlled conversation, and give them the chance to respond. That is both fairer and, in practice, safer for the complainant than the informal route.

Consistency is what you are actually buying

The test of a grievance procedure is not the first case. It is the second similar one, eighteen months later, handled by a different person — and whether the two outcomes can be explained side by side.

That is why the record matters more than it looks. Two employees who did much the same thing and received different treatment will find out, and the difference is only defensible if somebody wrote down at the time why it was different. Getting that discipline in place is the substance of grievance and disciplinary process work — two routes, named receivers, and a record that survives the person who made the decision.

Tell people it exists

A procedure nobody has been told about is a document. Brief it at induction, put it in the handbook, and say the alternative name out loud — because the entire value of that second name is that an employee knows it before they need it.

It belongs in the same controlled set as your other policies, with one current version and one owner, which is what HR documentation work is for. And where the same grievance keeps arriving from the same team, the answer is usually not a better procedure but a manager who has never been shown how to have a difficult conversation — which is leadership and people management territory rather than process.

What to do with the first real case

The first complaint raised after the procedure is written is the one that decides whether anybody uses it again. Two things matter more than the outcome: that the stated timings are met, and that the employee hears the conclusion from a person rather than by inference.

If the timings cannot be met — and sometimes they genuinely cannot — say so before the date passes, with a new date. A missed commitment that is explained costs very little. A missed commitment followed by silence costs the whole process.

Write the case up while it is fresh, in the half page the procedure calls for. It will feel unnecessary at the time. It becomes essential eighteen months later when a similar case arrives and somebody asks what was done last time, which is the entire reason grievance and disciplinary process work insists on the record rather than only the route.

When the same complaint keeps arriving

A procedure handles individual cases well and tells you nothing about patterns unless you look. Once a year, read the records together: which team they came from, what they were about, and how they were resolved. Three complaints from one team of eight is not three cases, it is one.

The record you keep when nothing is upheld

Most grievances in small businesses are not upheld, and the handling of that outcome is what determines whether anyone uses the procedure again.

A concern that is investigated and found not to be substantiated still needs a written outcome: what was looked at, what was concluded, and why. Not a finding against the person who raised it. A complainant who receives nothing in writing concludes the process was theatre, and tells colleagues so.

The record matters for a second reason that emerges later. Three unsubstantiated concerns about the same individual, over two years, raised by different people, is a pattern that no single investigation would have found. Without written outcomes, each is handled in isolation and forgotten, and the pattern only surfaces when something serious happens.

Keep the outcomes somewhere durable and restricted, held by role rather than by the individual who happened to handle it. The commonest failure in businesses without an HR function is that the record lives in the mailbox of whoever dealt with it, and leaves when they do — which means the business is repeatedly handling a first occurrence.

That reading is usually uncomfortable and almost always more valuable than the individual outcomes were.