Spotlight on growing complexity of workplace disputes

HR teams are dealing with a sharp rise in grievances, tribunal claims, and workplace disputes, with some employers seeing case numbers double in a relatively short period of time. At the same time, the disputes themselves are becoming more complex and more time-consuming to manage, with AI increasingly being used by employees to draft lengthy grievances and tribunal claims. For many employers, the real concern is that managers and HR teams are struggling to keep up. We’ll speak to a D&I expert who is helping a number of her clients rethink how their workplace disputes are managed.

For employers, the pressure is now falling heavily on managers, not just to follow policies, but to identify issues early, escalate them properly and handle difficult situations consistently and fairly in practice. They face growing scrutiny around investigations, conduct issues and reasonable adjustments, and increasingly they’re having to deal with lengthy and complex grievances and tribunal claims generated, or heavily influenced by, AI. As a result, employers are recognising that legal compliance alone is not enough and a far more joined up approach is needed. 

So, let’s get a view on this. Kate Dodd heads Pinsent Masons’ Employment Plus team which combines the firm’s expertise in employment law, workplace culture, and training and earlier she joined me by video-link to discuss it. So is this a trend across all sectors?

Kate Dodd: “Yes, it certainly is. It's really interesting because it felt like it started off with one or two clients who suddenly, having always experienced a handful of tribunals, maybe less than 10 per year, were up to kind of 20 plus, even approaching 30 tribunals, they were having many, many more ER issues, and then we were talking to each other and we started to realise it wasn't just any one of our clients, it was really being experienced across a whole range of clients in a whole range of sectors.”

Joe Glavina: “Trade union activity is on the rise, Kate, and that is set to continue. Do you think that’s a factor?”

Kate Dodd: “I definitely think there is a factor to it. I think the strengthening of employee rights is really at the centre of all of this, also driven by the economic situation so people are feeling much worse off, you know, the price of fuel, etcetera, rising unemployment levels. So people are feeling worse off, they’re feeling that less able to leave and then, of course, the unions are really massively empowered of course by everything that's going on and are also seeking to drive up their membership. This is a perfect opportunity for them to drive up their membership so they are fighting in relation to things that perhaps they would not have supported in the past, and they're also being very vocal in order to seek to win new members as well. So it's certainly not just employers who are unionised, we are seeing it with particular noise, or particular decision makings, from unions that perhaps we wouldn't have expected in the past.”

Joe Glavina: “AI is another factor, Kate, with employees increasingly using AI to help them draft lengthy and complex grievances. I’m sure you’ve noticed that.”

Kate Dodd: “Yes, I mean, it is something we are seeing hugely. We are seeing more tribunal cases and more grievances across all of our client base. Most definitely, AI is at play here and the reason for this really is because people feel empowered. They feel that they are able to articulate themselves without getting necessarily legal advice that they've felt as prohibitively expensive or difficult before. What this is causing, though, is actually the AI, of course, will tell you what you want it to tell you, it tells you what it thinks you want to hear, and it also will invent a lot of stuff. So, what we're seeing is huge complexity with reams and reams and reams of pages in terms of tribunal claim forms, grievances, complaints, and also employees, then, who aren't really able to explain what the crux of the situation is, and who quite often are bringing claims that they simply don't have because AI has suggested that this might be a claim that they should think about, and that is, of course, taking up a huge amount of time for our HR and ER clients.”

Joe Glavina: “One way to deal with that problem, Kate, is to impose a word limit on employee grievances. Is something you’re recommending to clients?” 

Kate Dodd: “Yes, so it is something that we are suggesting to our clients. There always have to be checks and balances there. We've got clients who are considering automated grievance processes so elements of that, responses being done, by AI, etcetera. That I think has to be done really, really carefully because obviously there's a chance of human error on the side of the employer, as well as  the employee. We also know that some AI systems are inherently discriminatory. We've always been aware of this possibility of discriminatory practices. You see it or hear about it all the time with things like facial recognition software, so real caution about automating things, but actually having a word limit is actually really, in my mind, not a bad idea at all. I think that having a word limit, having a form that people have to fill in that basically will say you’ve gone over the word limit for this, or the character number, will help both sides because it will help people to really kind of condense down what they want to say, and also it will help employers when they're trying to deal with it. Obviously, there might be reasonable adjustments that need to be made to those but ideally I think most people would be able to use word limit quite effectively, and also people can use AI. If they've got a long grievance, they can then use AI to distil that down for them and that I think would save everybody a lot of time.”

Joe Glavina: “We're seeing greater overlap these days between investigations, governance, training, culture etcetera, especially in sectors such as financial services and hospitality. Is this issue confined to a few sectors or are you seeing it right across the board?”

Kate Dodd: “No, I think it is right across the board. I think employees increasingly over the last few years have noticed the need to take not just a legal approach to things but also a cultural approach to things. I think they've increasingly recognized that it's almost like ‘whack a mole’, you know, you might deal with a particular problem here but then actually, you know, you have a solution to that that creates different problems for you down the line so employers are really needing to take much more of a holistic approach to this type of stuff. Businesses also are under a lot of pressure. What they don't want to do is to kind of feel that everything is being pushed on to the HR team so therefore there is a real need to upskill managers to make sure that that they know what they're doing, that they are being legally compliant but also doing things that work with the business, that will work with the business's strategy particularly as lots of businesses are themselves obviously dealing with higher overheads and really kind of increasing economic pressures. So yes, I think there is a real demand for increasing sophistication and being joined up across legal, cultural, reputational type of issues.”

Joe Glavina: “What are the risks if those elements that you described are not aligned, Kate? What problems are clients going to run into, potentially?”

Kate Dodd: “More than anything, is going to be employees complaining, employees bringing complaints, bringing grievances, bringing tribunal claims. We are seeing the tribunal numbers creeping up really rapidly. We're seeing final hearings now being listed for 2030 quite commonly. It used to be the exception that you would get a hearing date that far off, and now it's becoming very common across a number of different tribunals in different regions. Also, what we're really seeing is managers not following policies, managers who are not properly trained, who are not dealing with things, and aren't not escalating things in the way that they need to be escalated and that is causing real headaches for our HR and ER clients when obviously they're kind of trying to come in and deal with things at a later date.”

Joe Glavina: “What should HR professionals be doing now to get ahead of this shift that you've described?”

Kate Dodd: “Well, yes, I mean training. It sounds like an obvious point but it employers have to refresh the training not just for their HR teams themselves, but also for their line managers. We've got two really, really significant things about to change one of which is the reduction down in the qualifying period to bring an unfair dismissal claim to six months – that’s going to be huge – and also the removal of the cap on the unfair dismissal claims and, again, that’s going to be huge. So managers need to know what they're doing, they need to feel confident, they need to be managing performance at a really early stage, they need to be tackling not just behavioural issues, but also just people who are not up to the job. They need to understand things like reasonable adjustments; they need to understand neurodiversity. There are all sorts of things here that employers need to start getting sorted now so that when their managers are suddenly being asked to really effectively manage probationary periods, they're not saying, "oh, right, quick, we need a probation policy, or okay, we're moving to all reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment, quick, what does that mean?” So it's really about upskilling and training managers now and making sure that policies and processes are up to date and fit for the Employment Rights Act changes that we're continuing to see.”

Joe Glavina: “You head up Employment Plus which has been designed to respond to this shift. What is it? What has changed?”

Kate Dodd: “Yes, so it's really exciting for us. We've brought together all of our non, or beyond legal,  HR services. So for years we have been providing employers with complex investigation support, with mediation services, with coaching, with legal employment law training, with EDI - so diversity and inclusion services. We've had all of these things being done to help our employer clients make their workplaces legally compliant, but also great places to work. So what we've done is we've brought all of those together in one cohesive offering, and we are also in the midst of designing and launching our new tech platform to make it really easy to access for our clients so that they can come to us and they can say, you know, we need some help on a particular issue and then there is that full suite of services for them.”

Joe Glavina: “So how might this help clients in practice, Kate?”

Kate Dodd: “A really good example of this is, let's take probation. So, we know that employers really need to manage probationary periods. We also know that we've got more and more employees who have got neurodiverse conditions and therefore it's not going to be enough, really, just to kind of have a manager who's equipped to deal with probation, per se, generally. What we are also offering is the additional training, the additional upskilling – ‘just in time’ training, five minute modules, etcetera to say to an employer, right, you've got a manager who needs to deal with a probation issue but this individual has got a neurodiverse condition, so what should that manager be doing? How should that manager be making sure that that person is treated fairly, is treated with dignity, and really understands what's going on? So it's beyond the law and helping to take into account something like a neurodiverse condition.”

For HR teams, the message is that workplace disputes are no longer simply about reacting to grievances or defending tribunal claims after the event. Increasingly, the focus is shifting toward manager capability, early intervention, robust investigations and making sure policies actually work in practice. As employee relations issues become more complex, and more time-consuming, employers are recognising that legal advice, training, governance, and workplace culture can no longer be treated as separate issues. If you would like help reviewing how your business manages these issues, please do contact Kate. Her details are there on the screen for you.