Retaliatory complaint

[Slightaggrandising]

Anyone enacted performance management on someone and been subjected to a complaint from the employee about bullying?

Just wondered if it's common. FWIW, our organisation has 3 levels of decision bodies. The first two upheld the performance management decision (ie the employee wasn't up to scratch). The third overturned it for reasons unknown.

I always thought that I t’s extremely common, to the point it’s pretty much inevitable

Thanks @weaselwords

Just want to forget about this individual!!

I’m coaching someone at the moment who has experienced this recently with one of her direct reports. He was able to use counter complaints about micromanaging and bullying to wangle being moved away from her, which solved the problem in the short term but actually he’s just not very good at his job, is aggressive to other staff and should have been dealt with properly.

In my experience it comes down to how well your management will support you with the process. In my coachee’s case her management were very weak about the whole thing and basically just passed the problem employee on to someone else whilst making her look bad.

If it’s been through the entire complaint procedure etc and there’s no further recourse, you may well want to ask your manager to move the employee to a different manager (if there is one), citing breakdown of working relationship.

happened to me (I was the employee concerned). I have now been on LTS for 7 months and have submitted a grievance for bullying, discrimination and victimisation. I have a lot of evidence going back years. The performance management was for things they expected me to do without proper adjustments etc.

I have solid union support and a tribunal claim submitted.

HR were no use and put heavy pressure on me to drop my complaint and treated me like an inconvenience but they just ended up adding to my evidence.

So not every retaliatory complaint should be seen as an act of revenge or something. They should always be investigated because there really could be a good reason for the under performance, and not always simply because they are shit. Even aggressive language could be triggered by outside events. PIP needs to take everything into consideration and not just be slapped onto someone.

@Slightaggrandising it's missing the point and irrelevant asking about 'frequency'. Each case is individual, it's not useful to generalise.

If in your case, someone senior has overturned the performance management decision so presumably they have a justifiable reason. You may not know, or ever get to know, the rationale but clearly something went wrong (procedurally or due to misinterpretation of Policy, for example). Or discriminatory reasons that have emerged during interviews in the investigation stage.

The fact is if someone has been treated unfairly, not supported etc, then they will feel aggrieved if they are being marched down the disciplinary route in an attempt to manage them out and they will object if they have a strong case. There is always another side to the story, no matter how much anecdotal external evidence you get about an employee someone knew who was useless at their job.

Why would you not tell your employer about reasons for your underperformance though? To allow them to make reasonable adjustments? I mean, if this guy has been keeping it a secret, despite intense coaching and mentoring, how am I supposed to know?

Because you made them up at the last minute? cynical

I’ve found it very hard to “manage someone out” and HR has erred on the side of caution at all points IME. Any attempt to benchmark performance has been seen as bullying.

I'm just speculating - it may be a disability or health issue that has come to light and made them go "uh oh, there could be a discrimination claim here". Or maybe the employee has something on the company that they don't want made public.

In my own case, I have both disabilities and 'something on the company'.

If your employee does have a disability or health concern, maybe they disclosed to HR and HR did not share it with you. That's not HR's fault, its the law on data protection etc.

You should still always consult with HR before instigating PIP anyway and whilst HR may not be able to go into specific details, they may be able to offer some advice. So that could be a procedural issue that can lead to it being over turned.

Also, some individuals don't see themselves as having a disability or if they do, may not realise their rights until someone points it out to them - this could be the case here.

eg cancer (even once recovered), severe allergies, severe asthma, depression can all be covered by the equality act but not everyone realises this. So it is possible that either the employee or someone higher up has discovered something?

I'm just speculating though. There could be any number of reasons for it being overturned but I wouldn't assume that it is an unfair or wrong reason. If they won't tell you the reason then my bet is that its either discrimination or 'something on the company'.

Oh....or related/married to someone high up.

Yes. i had the absolutely audacity to expect someone to do the job they were employed to do!

They complained and all the people who heard the complaint agreed with me, that i was just asking her to do the job she was employed to do. It's a specific job and we had one of them in each county and so everyone knew what the job was. It wasn't rocket science. If she had been good at the other thing, then we'd have let her do it but other people were doing there job AND the other thing and they were better at it than she was, as well as achieving in their proper job. So I couldn't justify it on any count. But apparently that was me being a complete bitch.

You just gotta remember why you are there and what the bigger picture is and if you can't manage them up, manage them out.

Very common. I work in HR and see this a lot. It's why performance management needs to be evidence based, use others feedback not just line manager opinion etc.

I agree about evidence @Clouds, but the 'under-performer' is often the last voice to be listened to. The trouble is that it can become an echo-chamber with people aligning their views to what management want to hear, because they don't want to risk their job. It can quickly descend into a very dehumanising situation all round.

Recommend you base the PM on objective measures in that case daisychain
I ask my clients if person (under PM) was suddenly their best performer, how what they know, what would they see, what would they hear...

Use that to develop your measures.

Very hard to argue bullying if there is objective evidence they can't do the job. This will depend greatly on the type of job eg sales it is pretty much all objective evidence, more softer skills job it will require some thinking about.

My pp was an absolute farce and ended up being completely rewritten.

It was the final straw for me before raising a grievance as the person concerned had told other people they had got rid of people they didn't like, and what was being asked of me was utterly ludicrous.

So yes, I can see why this would happen too!