Employment

Case Studies

Difficult employees

Nigel arrived at work early on Tuesday morning. He had a client presentation to prepare for. He was pitching for a big new contract and really hoped to get the work, which would have been great news for his business, a relatively new start-up. The day before he had been out of the office at meetings, but had asked his secretary, Janet, to prepare the power-point slides for the client meeting.

On the day of the meeting Janet had not arrived by 10.30am. She had not called Nigel to say she was going to be late or even whether she was going to arrive at all. That had happened quite a lot, even though her terms and conditions of employment required her to ring Nigel if she was ill and off work. Nigel had already spoken to her informally several times about her poor timekeeping and her failure to comply with workplace procedures.

What made matters worse for Nigel was that Janet had not even made a start on the power-point slides. This was not the first time she had ignored his requests to do specific pieces of work. He had spoken to her about that as well.

Nigel thought about giving Janet a disciplinary warning, but he was not really sure how to go about it. He vaguely recalled someone telling him that nowadays there were certain dismissal and disciplinary procedures with which all employers must comply, but Nigel decided that those procedures would not apply to smaller businesses like his. 

Janet finally called Nigel at 12.45pm. She told him that she was taken unwell the day before, had she had been ill all night and this morning, and was unable to come to work that day. To say Nigel was furious was an understatement. In fact, he was so mad that he told her not to bother coming back as she was fired. He felt a bit like Alan Sugar!

Three weeks later Nigel cannot believe it when he receives a copy of the claim issued by Janet in the Employment Tribunal for unfair dismissal and sex discrimination. Janet alleges that he had dismissed her when she was off work ill, that he shouted and swore at her when she telephoned him, that he discriminated against her by calling her a blonde bimbo, and that he failed to follow a fair procedure when dismissing her. Janet had obviously taken legal advice.

Apparently, those dismissal and disciplinary procedure did apply to him, which means he's got to file a "response" to Janet's claim. And what was wrong with calling her a blonde bimbo? He really needed to speak to a lawyer.