Having two of its employees involved in a physical fight at work was concerning enough for this employer.
Then having the FWC reject the employer’s dismissal action as unfair was something the employer would not accept.
Find out what happened in the employer’s legal challenge to the initial finding and what it means for your misconduct procedures.
After a tumultuous few years through the courts, an employer’s decision to dismiss a fighting employee has finally been upheld by the Full Bench of the FWC.
The crux of the decision rested on whether years of systemic workplace bullying outweighed the employee’s extremely aggressive actions.
Luckily, the employer’s workplace investigation was not in question.
An employee accused of ‘blatant and deliberate’ disregard of a cardinal safety rule has been reinstated to his original position by the Fair Work Commission.
Numerous mitigating factors and reasons from the ensuing HR investigation meant that this employee’s sacking was unfair.
To the employer’s downfall, many of these factors were avoidable.
Read on to ensure your next workplace investigation avoids the disastrous consequences of this one…
Even employers with over 1000 employees and a dedicated human resources team can get workplace investigations wrong.
Contravening its own workplace policy, relying explicitly on a third party’s investigation report and superficially attempting to ensure procedural fairness; this employer really should have known better.
However as we have seen countless times, regardless of an employer’s size, navigating workplace investigations without a sound process is fraught with difficulty.
Yet another bungled workplace investigation has demonstrated the importance of covering all the bases when it comes to investigating serious misconduct in the workplace.
Even where an employer has a clearly valid reason for an employee’s immediate dismissal, it cannot rely on the valid reason alone. Time and again procedural flaws have brought employers’ workplace investigations undone.
Despite acts of significant gravity committed by the employees concerned, this employer learned a tough lesson about the importance of procedural fairness in HR investigations.
Two glaringly obvious flaws in its workplace investigation left this employer defenceless before the FWC.
The workplace investigation flaws subsequently left this employer $12,841.29 out of pocket.
Worse still, the flaws could have been easily avoided.
Read now to make sure you don’t make the same mistakes!
