As employers, when handling staff appeal, care must be taken not to unreasonably prolong appeal hearing and decision process. The ACAS codes recommend five working days as usually appropriate. ACAS stands for Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service.
The Employment Act 2002 also required employers to ensure each step and action taken under the Appeal procedure without unreasonable delay.
Lets look at a case. A member of staff was being disciplined for alleged in direct competition with the employer. The staff was dismissed immediately. The staff wrote to the employer to appeal against their decisions on 21 November 2008.
The appeal hearing was made to hear on 2 December 2008. It was more than 5 working days.
The decision of appeal was communicated to the staff on 08 December 2008. The whole appeal process took 11 working days to finalize. This was an obvious undue delay in the Appeal process.
The Employment Tribunals or the court may take the unreasonable delay in the appeal process into account when assessing employers’ reasonableness. If the employer considered the allegations were serious enough to dismiss the staff based on the evidences then there should be no excuse to delay in finalizing the case.
What the Employment Tribunals or the court does not want was that employers use disciplinary process to get rid of their staff to avoid redundancy payout or compensation.
Small companies are reminded to include staff disciplinary procedures in their employees’ handbook and every employee must be given a copy of the handbook so that they aware of your company rules.
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