HR Case Files: Handling a Grievance Without a Paper-Trail Nightmare
A grievance is a process with steps, dates, people and documents. Treat it as a case from the first email and the tribunal bundle writes itself.
The moment an employee raises a grievance, a clock starts. Acknowledge within days. Investigate. Hold a meeting, with the right to be accompanied. Decide. Communicate. Offer an appeal. Each step has a date, a document and a person responsible — and if it ever reaches a tribunal, the first thing requested is the complete, ordered record of all of it.
Most HR teams keep that record in an email folder and a shared drive. It works until it doesn't.
A grievance as a case
An HR matter template gives the process a shape: the employee and their representative in contact roles; the investigating manager and the decision-maker in others; the key dates as tracked fields (raised, acknowledged, meeting, outcome, appeal deadline); a table for interviews; a table for documents received. Case security is set at the template level so the case is hidden from anyone who is not a member — including the rest of HR, if that is the policy.
Email is the evidence
Grievances happen in email. File the original complaint into the case from Mail, and every reply after it. The message keeps its headers and timestamps. When a manager writes "I never received that", the case shows the message, the date it was sent, and the date the reply came back.
Meetings and notes
Interview notes go in the interview table: date, attendees, a summary, the full note as an attached file. If notes are to be shared with the employee for agreement, send them from the case and file the response. An e-sign request is a clean way to have the employee confirm a set of notes as accurate.
Letters from the case
Acknowledgement, invitation to meeting, outcome, appeal invitation: four letters with the same fields — name, dates, the right to be accompanied, the deadline. Design them once as documents on the template and generate each from the case. The wording is consistent across every matter, and the letter you sent is the letter on file.
The bundle
When it is over — or when it goes further — the case timeline is the chronology, the files are the exhibits, and the contact roles are the dramatis personae. Export what is needed. Then set the retention date and let the review rule ask, years later, whether it can go.
One more thing
An HR case is exactly the kind of matter where "the admin can technically see it" is a real concern. That is what Advanced-Security cases are for: encrypted with their own key, invisible to non-members, even to the people who run the workspace.
