How To Handle a Grievance Appeal Without an HR Team

Most guidance on grievance appeals is written with a reasonable-sized HR function in mind. There is someone to advise on process, someone to manage the paperwork, someone who has done this before. The appeal gets scheduled, the bundle gets prepared, the outcome letter gets drafted, and the whole thing moves through a familiar organisational channel.

For small businesses, that description bears no resemblance to reality.

In a business of ten, twenty, or even fifty people, there often is no HR team. There might be a manager with some HR responsibility alongside a full-time operational role. There might be a part-time administrator who handles contracts and absence records. There might be nobody at all, and the founder or director is doing everything themselves. And then a grievance appeal lands, and suddenly there is a formal legal process to manage with no infrastructure to manage it.

This post is for those organisations. It is a practical guide to handling a grievance appeal when you do not have an HR function, do not have a specialist on hand, and are working out how to do this properly under real-world constraints.

Start with the ACAS Code

The ACAS Code of Practice on Disciplinary and Grievance Procedures is the foundation of any grievance process in the UK. Employment tribunals are required to take it into account when considering relevant cases, and can adjust any compensatory award by up to 25% where an employer has unreasonably failed to follow it. It is free, it is publicly available, and it sets out the basic expectations in plain language.

For a grievance appeal, the Code requires that the appeal is heard without unreasonable delay, that the employee is informed of the hearing in advance, that they are reminded of their right to be accompanied, that the appeal is dealt with impartially, and that the outcome is communicated in writing. These are the non-negotiables. Everything else is process design around those principles.

Reading the Code before you do anything else is not a substitute for experience or advice, but it gives you a framework. It tells you what the minimum requirements are, which means you can at least avoid the most basic procedural errors.

Decide who is going to chair it

This is the first and most important decision. The person chairing the appeal should not have been involved in the original grievance. That means not the person who investigated it, not the person who issued the outcome, and not someone with a close personal or reporting relationship to either of those people.

In a small business this constraint can be difficult to satisfy. If the original grievance was handled by the only senior manager, and that manager reports to the two directors who are now being asked to chair the appeal, the options narrow quickly. If the grievance involves the directors themselves, the options may disappear entirely.

Be honest about this early. Do not appoint someone to chair the appeal because they are available and willing if they are not genuinely independent. A compromised appointment creates a compromised process, and a compromised process creates tribunal risk that could have been avoided.

If there is no viable internal candidate, appoint an external one. An independent external chair can be appointed quickly, is clear of any conflict of interest, and produces an outcome that the employee and their representative cannot challenge on grounds of independence. The cost is modest relative to the alternative.

Get the paperwork in order

A grievance appeal requires a document bundle. At minimum this should include the original grievance letter or letters, the notes or report from any investigation that took place, the original outcome letter, and the employee's grounds of appeal.

If additional documents are relevant - correspondence between the parties, policies or procedures referenced in the grievance, occupational health reports, contractual documents - these should be included too. The bundle does not need to be perfect, but it needs to be complete enough for the chair to understand what happened, what was decided, and what the employee is saying was wrong with it.

Index the bundle. Number the pages. This sounds bureaucratic but it matters. A hearing where nobody can find the document being referred to is a hearing that takes twice as long and produces twice the frustration. A well-organised bundle is a basic courtesy to everyone involved, including the employee.

Share the bundle with the employee in advance of the hearing, with enough time for them to review it. They may have documents of their own to add. If they do, those should be shared with the employer's representative too. There should be no surprises on the day.

Notify the employee properly

The employee needs to be notified of the hearing in writing. The notification should include the date, time, and format of the hearing, the name of the person chairing it, a reminder of their right to be accompanied by a trade union representative or work colleague, and confirmation of how to submit any additional documents they wish to rely on.

This sounds straightforward but small businesses regularly get it wrong by being too informal. A text message or a verbal conversation is not sufficient notification of a formal hearing. An email setting out the details clearly is the minimum. A letter is better.

If the employee requests a postponement because their chosen companion is unavailable, they have a statutory right to propose an alternative date within five working days. This is a legal right, not a discretionary courtesy. It applies whether or not you find it inconvenient.

At the hearing

Keep it structured. The chair opens, explains their role and the format, and invites the employee to present their grounds of appeal. The employee speaks. The chair asks questions. The employer's representative responds. The chair asks further questions. The employee has the final word. The hearing closes. The chair deliberates. The outcome is communicated in writing.

That structure exists for a reason. It ensures both sides are heard, it creates a clear record of what was said, and it prevents the hearing from becoming an unstructured argument about the original events rather than a focused consideration of the grounds of appeal.

Take notes. If you do not have someone available to take notes, ask whether the hearing can be recorded with the consent of all parties. A record of what was said matters if the process is subsequently challenged.

Do not try to resolve the matter at the hearing itself. The chair is there to listen, consider, and decide - not to negotiate. If the employee makes a settlement proposal or raises matters outside the scope of the appeal, note them and deal with them separately. The appeal process and any without prejudice discussions are different things and should be kept apart.

The written outcome

This is the part that most small businesses get wrong, not because they are careless, but because they underestimate how important it is.

The outcome letter needs to address each ground of appeal in turn. It needs to explain what evidence was considered. It needs to give reasons for the conclusions reached. A letter that says the appeal has been carefully considered and the original outcome is upheld tells the employee nothing and gives a tribunal very little to assess.

Where the appeal raises legally sensitive grounds - disability, discrimination, flexible working, whistleblowing - the outcome needs to engage with those grounds specifically. A general dismissal of the appeal without addressing the legally complex elements is not sufficient and will be treated as such if the matter proceeds further.

Write the outcome promptly. Best practice is within five to ten working days of the hearing concluding. The longer it takes, the more it looks like the decision is being constructed rather than reached. And the longer it takes, the more the employee's frustration has time to harden into a decision to take the matter to tribunal.

When to get external help

There is no shame in recognising that a particular situation is beyond the internal capability of the organisation to handle well. A grievance appeal involving disability, discrimination, union representation, or a substantial document bundle is a complex matter. Getting it wrong has real consequences.

External support does not have to mean handing the whole process over. It might mean a single advisory conversation with an experienced HR professional to check your process before the hearing. It might mean asking someone external to review the draft outcome letter before it is sent. It might mean appointing an independent chair for the hearing itself while managing the logistics internally.

The cost of that support, in most cases, is modest. The cost of a poorly run appeal that ends up in tribunal proceedings - in legal fees, management time, stress, and reputational damage - is considerably higher.

Small businesses without HR teams are not at a disadvantage in grievance appeals simply because they lack infrastructure. They are at a disadvantage if they treat the process as a bureaucratic obligation to be got through rather than a genuine opportunity to reach a fair outcome. The two things are different. And the difference, in the end, is what employment judges are assessing.