Rojgar Job News

So said German lithographer Herm Albright in a rare moment’s cynicism, but of course if you really want to get on your colleagues’ nerves, a hostile or negative attitude is far more to be commended. So here is a question arising from a matter on which we were recently instructed. Client’s employee has a persistently difficult attitude – rude, micro-(and indeed macro-)aggressive, sullen, lots of tutting and sighing, a distinct snippiness to his tone and all this still in his probationary period. Off to a flier, clearly.  When the employer’s concerns were raised with him, back came quite a lot more lip plus the assertion that it was all the product of some still unspecified mental health condition. That may or may not be so in this particular case, but it begs a difficult question – to what extent is an employer obliged to tolerate sub-standard “attitude” in the workplace if it has or may have its origin in a disability? The issue is pa...

You have tried to counsel, to mediate and to make every adjustment you possibly can, but in the end you have run into a single insurmountable fact about your employee with the attitude – you just can’t bear him any longer. He is the dragging anchor of your otherwise happy little ship and must be cut loose for everyone’s benefit, potentially including his own. We know that Employment Tribunals get very sticky about conduct or performance cases dressed up to look like “some other substantial reason” loss of trust and confidence clashes. The ETs see this (often entirely properly) as the employer’s attempt to side-step the usual fair dismissal requirements of prior warnings, time to improve, etc. To the extent that your employee’s attitude problem manifested itself primarily through conduct or performance, that is what you should ideally do. This is partly because it might take the shock of formal procedures to jolt your employee out of whatever dar...

In the first two posts in this series, I looked at the law around workplace attitudes which might stem from some form of disability. But what if your employee is fit and well in all respects bar being exceptionally painful to work with? He may be relentlessly negative, make heavy weather out of every instruction, or just operate on a very short fuse, often perfectly civil but prone to detonation when colleagues overstep some clearly very important, but also absolutely invisible, line in their dealings with him. He is, in every sense, grit in the gearbox of your business. But without obvious performance or conduct concerns, what can you do? Probably the first point is to ascertain whether the employee himself recognises the problems he is causing to his colleagues. This won’t be an easy conversation but it forces him to confront the problem head-on. He may demand to know who has complained and require detailed examples of where others have been offended. By the very nature of a poo...

In my post last week, I considered the extent of an employer’s duty to make reasonable adjustments to accommodate an employee whose difficult workplace attitude is alleged to have its origins in a disability. However, there is another angle to this question which the employer must also bear in mind. Section 15 Equality Act 2010 make it unlawful for an employer to treat an employee unfavourably “ because of something arising in consequence of ” his disability, unless it can show that treatment to be justified. In other words, one step removed from direct less favourable treatment because of the disability itself; instead, such treatment on the basis of something stemming from it. There are untold cases around the required degree of knowledge of the disability and of causation of the “something”, but they pretty much all depend on their own facts (this one is a particularly extreme example [here]). For present purposes, let us assume that the employer accept...