The individually fired rarely thinks it’s fair. Their boss is always convinced it’s justified. HR have their doubts. The headline is often misleading. Why would someone be fired for such trivial reason. But getting under either the headline and the reason becomes clearer. Even so a HR may think the individual has a case for unfair dismissal.
Sacked for eating a left over tuna sandwich was the recent headline concerning an office cleaner who was dismissed for stealing food. Another headline was Valentines cards sent by funeral director to local Old People’s Home. At first this seemed inappropriate, did someone think this was funny? It turn out that it was part of the local funeral directors marketing strategy just like sending Christmas cards.
An employee was fired for getting a hair cut in their lunch break .It transpired they booked a hair cut in their lunch break but didn’t return to the office for two hours. The employee had a history of poor time keeping. Their unrepentant attitude was the last straw for their line manager.
Dismissed for failing to take the shortest rout for a mileage claim. Suspected of fiddling their mileage claim finance examined an employees recent journey’s and found that they had claimed for more miles than the distance on the map. A cut and dried case turned into major industrial action when the individual claimed that road workers and a desire to avoid traffic jams was the explanation. It also turned out that employees often filled their mileage claims in respect may be as much as a month after the journey and estimated the mileage. Check any employees mileage claim and you would find discrepancies.
Sending personal items through the internal post is clearly an abuse of office equipment but does a one off incident constitute gross misconduct? Probably not if it was a birthday card, but this was “sexy” underwear!
The biggest problem in cases like these is where managers jump the gun and fire the individual without following the organisations HR policies and procedures. Do that and the employee is likely to win a case of unfair dismissal on technical grounds.
