And many only got away with it because the employee was too professional to pursue a case of unfair dismissal. But it doesn’t mean that because you have become accustomed to traumatise people out of their jobs, that it is ok, or that you are very clever. It is bad practice on your part and brings you litigious risk.
We are talking in this series about disciplinary policy and practice, and last week we looked at the overall importance of using these policies in good faith instead of trying to manipulate the employee through a convoluted set of allegations of misconduct or poor performance just so you can justify a dismissal. When we talked about that practice, of manipulating circumstances to set up a dismissal, we also looked at the concepts of fairness through the process of discipline. Because most of the time (to be honest) dismissals are constructive, let us perhaps start off talking about that before we go to defining policies.
