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I often say this to my clients: We only have a problem if someone has a problem. You can be as technically correct as you like, but if someone is sufficiently motivated to take legal action, they are going to, and no matter how clean your case is. The opposite is also true- not everyone takes a personal grievance (PG), no matter how ramshackle the process. Lots of organisations get away with firing people on the spot. Why and how? Because the person didn’t sufficiently feel hard done by.

They raise PGs to get money.

Okay, it’s a bit about the money. You wouldn’t have believed me if I hadn’t covered this. People can be compensated even if what they did was wrong, and that feels wrong to us, because they shouldn’t. But it’s not amazing money; it’s not ‘buy a house’ money; more ‘buy a car’ money, and a secondhand car at that. No one is getting rich off raising a personal grievance, who wasn’t getting rich anyway. Half of what people do get is compensation for lost earnings, which they would have earned otherwise, and really they are just recovering what they were out of pocket from losing their job.

It's about their feelings

Just because they are feelings, doesn’t mean we ignore them. Every action we take in life starts with feelings. Reason is the path, emotions are the driver.

Personal grievances are not about the money, nor about exacting a negative outcome on the organisation. It’s about balancing the books, both emotionally and financially. Like your salary, the money is more about the ‘score’ than the utility the money affords; getting paid out in a settlement is more about evening the score with the employer

They don’t know the rules, and if they do, it doesn’t matter. Very, very few people punish others just because they can, and most people don’t seek to punish, but instead only seek to get even.

There is a saying that I learnt in my first year in the ER game and it still knocks around in my head. ‘People will forget what you said, they will forget what you do, but they will remember who you made them feel’. PGs are call personal grievances for a reason; they are aggrieved, and it’s personal. Their feelings have been hurt, and they believe they should not have been.

It's about justice

Some people raise a personal grievance for the money, but for most people what drives them is the need for justice. They feel they have been done wrong; that their dignity, their mana, their sense of self-worth and value have been damaged unfairly, and this is their way to get a third party to judge the situation, in the expectation that they will be proven right.

Unfortunately you don’t get this in mediation because the mediator will sit on the fence, so get a judgement, the employer or the employee needs to go the authority, which is almost always a bridge too far.

To speak truth to power for once

This is similar, but different. Most employees feel the need to bite their tongue in the workplace; that they cannot speak freely to their boss, and are much more ‘yes sir, no sir’ than they wish to be. They feel put upon and unable to fairly defend themselves. This is their chance to speak their truth to this power, they stop having to play nice, and start saying what they really think. This can be fair, especially in small companies where often the owner (or the owner’s wife/boyfriend/old friend from school) can act like a tyrant.

The misguided sense of their own importance

So far I’ve covered the good reasons why people feel raise PGs, now for a bad reason. Some people have an unrealistic sense of their importance, and don’t know or don’t care about the comparative feelings of others; they unconsciously believe that how they feel is the only factor of importance.

For example, this is the low-level bully who vents at others, or the person who doesn’t do their job because they are distracted by their life. The person who expects others to do their job for them, or suffer their emotional outbursts. You know the type; those with ‘main character syndrome’. These are the people who fundamentally reject any proposition put to them that others are just as important as them.

What about the money makers?

Let’s set up an archetype and then set it aside. There are some people out there who are serial and recidivist litigants who make money out of personal grievances, who go from job to job getting payouts. But I’m erring on the caution here; after 50 years there has been some anecdotal evidence from lawyers, advocates and the courts that there are some ‘high frequency’ litigants, but nothing firm. To put it this way- you can’t find the name of any such person.

In addition, the anecdotal evidence of serial misuse of these tools of justice is often within employment, not across employment. Where people do continuously raise complaints and personal grievances, it’s within organisations for the purpose of getting their way within their employment, not cash-outs as they move from job to job.

So what do you do?

Don’t forget how you are making people feel. More often than not, when I dismiss someone, they will shake my hand and apologise, and accept my ‘I wish you well for the future’ at face value. Because I genuinely mean it. This is because I don’t just follow the rules, but I also remember the person at the centre of the storm, and take all steps I practically can to avoid or diminish the emotional impacts. Getting dismissed, receiving a warning, or being made redundant are real career/life low points regardless, so it’s good avoid any accidental kicking while they are down.

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Why people take Personal Grievances