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A. Yes. Serial grievance makers exist, as do serial claimants at tribunal.
If you are a fan of civil law research, there’s a page dedicated to these types of claimants called the vexatious litigants page. The courts may have the power to bar a serial claimant from making further claims but in your client’s situation, each grievance should be investigated and an outcome provided.
There are two types of grievances an employee can make, an informal grievance and a formal one. Identifying which type of grievance is important because the process looks very different to each.
Informal grievances are common in the workplace, it may come to you in the form of a quiet word or second-hand gossip about someone else’s feelings about a particular situation.
Informal grievances can escalate if you don’t address them. The quickest resolution is to empathise if someone is feeling negatively about you or your business because historically, outright dismissing their feelings probably won’t make the issue go away, if anything it may fester and grow into a formal grievance that requires a throughout investigation.
Empathising doesn’t mean agreeing but if the employee walks away from the talk feeling misunderstood or not listened too, the issue will not be resolved.
I wonder if this is what happened with your client, a small issue is raised and left unresolved and in retaliation or in the hope of a different outcome the employee continues to raise issues. If this rings true for your situation, I would suggest your client goes back to the original grievance and reviews their approach. Your client may consider having a therapeutic conversion about how the employee feels at and about work, perhaps once the underlying cause of the tension is revealed and addressed, the constant grievances will cease.
As long as the grievance is low risk (not be related to a protected characteristic) an employer can email their employee back and offer either the formal or informal route. The employer can also ask how the employee wishes for the issue to be resolved and whether they would consider mediation of it’s a person-to-person issue.
If the employee has confirmed that they wish the grievance to be formal, ask them to write it down, if they have not yet done so and acknowledge its receipt. Invite them into a formal meeting using an invite letter and hold the meeting, take the minutes and allow the employee to be accompanied.
Next, you investigate the allegation. Investigations consist of fact finding and or witness statements, you may need to view CCTV (if your employment contacts allow this) and search for supporting documentation that either proves or disproves the allocation.
Once the investigation is complete, you can issue an outcome letter. This letter should either uphold, partially uphold or not uphold the grievance, always offer the right to appeal. On the surface a grievance may seem silly but there may be more going on and if your client fails in their duty to investigate a claim, they may have more paperwork to deal with in the long run, if the employee decides to take matters to tribunal.
