A domiciliary care coordinator raises a written grievance: she says the rota is deliberately built to give the best-paid calls to two favoured colleagues, and that when she questioned it she was moved to runs an hour from home. The registered manager who sets the rota is the owner's daughter. The whole office is seven people.
This is the classic small-team grievance: everyone involved knows everyone else, the person complained about is close to the decision-maker, and there is no HR department to absorb any of it.
Why "we'll sort it informally" fails here
Informal resolution is genuinely the right first step for many grievances — the ACAS Code says so. But it relies on someone neutral doing the sorting. When the manager complained about is family to the owner, an informal chat isn't resolution; it's the complaint being marked by the person it's about. The coordinator predictably escalates, and now the employer has a formal grievance plus a record of having brushed it off.
The conflict problem is the whole problem
In a seven-person office there is no internal person who can fairly hear this. The owner can't — it's their daughter. The daughter can't — it's about her. Another coordinator can't — they're on the rota being disputed. This is precisely the situation external HR exists for.
A grievance investigation doesn't decide who wins. It establishes facts: how the rota is actually built, what the pay data shows, when the run changes happened and why. Facts are what let a small employer make a defensible decision — and what protect them if the coordinator later claims constructive dismissal or victimisation.
What the investigation actually did
- Pulled six months of rota and pay data and compared call allocations across the team
- Interviewed the coordinator, the manager, and the two colleagues named
- Established the run reallocation happened two days after the complaint — timing that needed explaining
- Found the "favouritism" partly explained by qualifications, but the reallocation unexplained by any business reason
The report upheld one part of the grievance and not the other. The employer reversed the run change, moved rota sign-off to a documented process, and offered mediation between coordinator and manager. The coordinator stayed. No tribunal claim was ever made.
The lesson for small employers
Victimisation claims — being punished for raising a complaint — have no cap on compensation where discrimination is involved, and the two-day timing would have been the centrepiece of any claim. Splitting the grievance from the personalities cost a fixed fee and a fortnight. Defending a tribunal claim would have cost the relationship, the reputation, and a five-figure sum in time and legal fees.
When a team is too small to hear its own complaints, buying in independence isn't a luxury. It's the only way the process can be fair — and be seen to be fair.
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