What To Do When An Employee Complains About Another Employee

Handling Employee Complaints About Colleagues: A Sheffield Employer's Guide

Someone knocks on your door, or more likely messages you on Teams asking for "five minutes", and what follows is a complaint about a colleague. Maybe it's about tone in meetings. Maybe it's something more serious. Either way, most small business owners in Sheffield have never been trained for this moment, and it shows.

I've sat across the table from enough founders across South Yorkshire to know the instinct. You want to fix it quickly. You want both people to shake hands and get back to work, because there's a client deadline on Thursday and you didn't start a business to referee arguments. Understandable. Also usually the wrong move.

Listen first, categorise second

Not every complaint is a grievance, and not every grievance needs the full formal process. But you won't know which is which until you've actually listened, properly, without trying to solve it in the same conversation. Write down what's been said. Ask what outcome the person wants, because sometimes it's genuinely just "I wanted you to know" and nothing more.

The mistake I see most often, from Kelham Island startups to more established manufacturing firms out towards Rotherham, is treating every complaint the same way. A one-off comment that landed badly is not the same as a pattern of behaviour going back eight months. Context matters more than the policy document.

Don't promise confidentiality you can't deliver

People will ask you to keep it between the two of you. You often can't, not fully, not if it needs investigating. Better to be honest about that upfront than to break a promise later and lose their trust entirely.

When to bring in outside support

If it involves a manager, if it involves your own family member in a family business (more common in this region than people admit), or if you genuinely don't know whether it's serious enough to investigate, that's the point to get advice rather than guess. Getting it wrong doesn't just cost you the specific case. It costs you the next five people who decide it's not worth raising anything.

If you're a Sheffield or South Yorkshire employer without an HR function to lean on for this, that's exactly the gap King HR Advisory fills. A short call is usually enough to work out whether this needs a formal process or a five-minute conversation.