Poor dismissal process costs employer over £61k at Tribunal

The recent case of Shah v Food Hub Limited has highlighted how shooting first and asking questions later can come back to bite employers.

What happened:

  • Mr Shah was a Field Sales Manager with 5 years’ service. His role required travel around the UK to meet clients in person.
  • Food Hub noticed his travel decreased and became concerned he was not fulfilling his duties.
  • Upon monitoring his IP address they had suspicions he spent some time working remotely from Egypt.
  • Shah disputed the evidence pointing out inconsistencies between consecutive days where he purportedly worked in Cairo, London and Cairo again.
  • Shah also acknowledged he had to stay in Egypt longer than his holiday having contracted COVID and not being able to travel.
  • Food Hub’s CEO reviewed Shah’s expenses and noted his expenses were far lower than other sales staff. He invited Shah to a meeting for a “catch up.”
  • The CEO alleged Shah had been “stealing money from the company” before dismissing on the spot.
  • Shah appealed, was reinstated and then immediately put under investigation for the same allegation. He was eventually dismissed by an employee much less senior than the CEO.

Shah started claims for unfair dismissal, breach of contract and religious discrimination.

The unfair dismissal claim succeeded. The Tribunal criticised Food Hub for reinstating then immediately suspending the Claimant.

The impartiality of the process, particularly the seniority of those involved in the appeal and subsequent disciplinary resulted in an uplift to the award of 25% for failure to follow ACAS Code of Practice 1.

Result: Shah pockets £61k.

What can HR learn from this?

Process first! Even the CEO can’t go rogue and fire on the spot. If the process does go wrong, own it in the appeal and instead issue a lesser sanction. The reinstate new disciplinary fiasco could have easily been avoided.

Fair reason = fair dismissal. Having a gut feeling, or partial evidence is not grounds to dismiss if the employee has not had the allegations and evidence put to them and given chance to respond. As with maths homework at school, you have to show your working out, not just the answer!

Finally witness evidence and credibility was heavily criticised in this judgment, including the CEO. If you are not confident in your witnesses perhaps a commercial settlement is preferable to dirty linen being aired in public!