Can You Manage Your Employee Grievance Process?
We had a customer meeting last month and the customer was trying to solve a very basic, but important problem – managing their grievance process. Their current method in tracking an employee’s grievance was a nightmare. Image a system with paper folders, unconnected communications, and sticky notes. They didn’t know who was doing what, what remained to be completed, whether they were completing tasks on-time, and had no easy ability to look at the history of a given grievance or come up with any meaningful statistics on how they were handling grievances.
So what do they want?
They want to track an employee’s grievance from beginning to end. More specifically they wanted to:
- Track all interactions no matter the communication channel;
- Know which HR advisor is responsible for the grievance at any given point in time (the person might change during the process);
- Be able to assign different tasks to various HR advisors or other departments, and know which of these tasks are completed and which are still open;
- Automatically notify a manager if a given task wasn’t completed within a prescribed time period;
- Have a complete audit trail of the entire interaction with an employee during the grievance process; and
- Provide employees the ability to check on the status of grievances themselves without tying up HR advisors.
Why is this important? Because it helps avoid turning grievances into lawsuits, which translates into greater cost and ties up company resources. Do you know what the cost of a single lawsuit is? The median award for employment-related claims in 2009 was $326,640. Wouldn’t it be great if you could avoid this expense?
Guess what? Dovetail Support Suite for HR can do this out of the box, and a lot more, and it can be up and running in days or weeks, not months. If this sounds like a problem you would like to solve, let’s talk.
Until Next Time,
Stephen
