What happens here then... HR and dismissal tribunal

[Ragevibration]

What would happen in this scenario?

An employer is being taken to a an employment tribunal for a discrimination claim.

The company did discrinate against the individual despite repeated, strong discouragement from taking that course of action from HR.

Presumably, the HR Manager will be called as a witness at the tribunal. They cannot lie at tribunal obviously, but if they answer the questions truthfully they have thrown their employer very much under the bus and they will likely lose the case.

This will surely damage the relationship between the employer and the HR Manager?

So what happens. Is it just a case of a rock and a hard place?

Why do you assume the HR Manager will be called as a witness?

Are you the HR Manager?

I am not the HR Manager no.

I just assumed the HR Manager would be called as a witness to prove (or not) what policies were followed and how, what advice she gave etc.

Yep, pretty much. In mine the hr manager admitted that she advised my line manager to take a different course of action and that told the tribunal that my line manager had made multiple mistakes. I won. They lost. Don’t know if the hr person still works there. My line manager still does though!

The HR person in my case gave very very careful answers which were as minimal as possible but had to answer, truthfully, that my boss had not followed the policies or her advice. A good barrister will force the truth out under oath.

Giving truthful evidence in a tribunal will only damage the relationship if the employer expects the HR Manager to lie and he/she refuses. If they are the kind of employer to ignore advice and then expect him/her to lie about it, I would expect the HR Manager to be job hunting anyway.

Would be very unusual for us to call an HR manager as a witness. The witnesses would usually be the dismissing manager (if there was a dismissal) or the manager who determined the grievance (if there was a grievance), the appeals manager and potentially the person(s) accused of discrimination (depending on the allegations). I have been a solicitor conducting employment tribunal advocacy for 20 years.

That's really interesting, thanks.

My only experience of a tribunal was a mock one by local employment lawyers.

It is an SME and so the HR Manager has been very involved with regards to communication surrounding the investigations and grievance and has been accused of being involved in the discrimination or being aware of it and not acting appropriately.

The tribunal will want to see evidence of appropriate policies being followed by employers, and employees, regardless of what job they do. Therefore knowing the policies and what was a breach of them is fundamental.

If the HR manager gave advice that wasn’t followed, then the company won’t want this person turning up at the tribunal to give any evidence. What they said or didn’t say clearly didn’t get listened to and that’s the point really. Any decent representative will be able to prove the company mishandled this, so that’s the most important thing, not the HR employee who was ignored. It’s the company that has to answer the allegations.