In this chapter you will learn about:

• ∎ what you can expect from grievance procedures

• ∎ what help a victim may need

• ∎ the immediate support you can expect

• ∎ the longer-term support.

Introduction

We saw in earlier chapters that your employer's overall health and safety policy should include details of responses to staff after an incident involving any form of aggression. Every effort should be made to help minimize and control the impact on staff, and to ensure that they recover from the incident as soon as possible.

It can often be clear (especially in the case studies in Chapter 10) that management in many cases does not want to ‘rock the boat’ and will not accept that anything is going wrong in their workplace. Hence, it is necessary for the health and safety policy to identify the staff with principal responsibilities at each stage, so that all staff members are informed of their role and, more importantly, what they should do in case of such incidents.

Using the grievance procedure

When an incident involves two members of staff, or when an incident involving a member of staff and a member of the public is not dealt with satisfactorily, the library's grievance procedure can be followed in an attempt to bring the matter to closure as completely as possible for those concerned.

The library's grievance procedure should be written down and should specify who should be contacted. Sometimes it is better for the people involved to be brought together to discuss the situation before it escalates into days, months and perhaps years of agony for members of staff. The Commission for Racial Equality advice in the Statutory Code of Practice on racial equality in employment states:

Grievance procedure