Employee complaint process flowchart (grievance procedure)
Employee complaint process flowchart with swimlanes for employee, line manager, HR, investigator and senior management, from grievance raised to record closed.
How it works
Rename the lanes to your real roles
Replace Employee, Line manager, HR, Investigator and Senior management with the functions that exist in your organisation. Smaller employers usually merge HR and Investigator, in which case state explicitly who investigates when HR is itself involved in the complaint. Larger organisations often split HR into a case handler and a hearing chair. Keep the Employee lane even though it holds only four nodes: it shows every point where the employee is waiting for a response.
Name the alternative recipient on the opening branch
'Grievance concerns the line manager?' is only useful if the Yes branch names someone reachable. Put a role and a contact route on it — an HR business partner, the manager's manager, a designated senior contact — and repeat it in the handbook. A route that exists only on the diagram will not be used by the person who needs it.
Set your acknowledgement and response timescales
Add real numbers to 'Log and acknowledge in writing', to the hearing and to the outcome letter, and state where each clock starts. Anchoring to the logged receipt date rather than to when someone opens the file is what makes the commitment measurable, and it is the figure people will quote back to you later.
Write the criteria behind the whistleblowing branch
'Whistleblowing or safeguarding risk?' needs objective triggers: risk of harm to a person, a legal or regulatory breach, a safeguarding concern, or an allegation against someone senior enough that normal escalation is compromised. Link the Yes branch to your whistleblowing and safeguarding policies so the documents cannot drift apart.
Decide who chairs the hearing and who hears the appeal
An appeal is worthless if it is decided by the person who made the original decision. Name a chair for 'Hold the grievance hearing' and a different, ideally more senior, decision-maker for 'Hear the appeal and decide', and record the reasoning on both. Confirm the employee's right to be accompanied in the meeting invitation itself, not only in the policy.
Set the retention period, then publish the version
Decide how long grievance papers are kept and where the restricted file lives, and agree both with whoever owns data protection. Then approve and date the map as the version your written procedure refers to. If an outcome is disputed later, what matters is which version was in force at the time, so keep the revision history rather than editing in place.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between an informal complaint and a formal grievance?
An informal complaint is a conversation aimed at fixing the problem quickly, usually with the line manager and without an investigation. A formal grievance is a written statement that starts a defined procedure: an investigation, a hearing, a written outcome and a right of appeal. In this chart the two are separated by the 'Resolved informally?' decision, and the No branch is where the employee submits the grievance in writing and the process changes character. Employees should not be forced to exhaust the informal route first — serious allegations such as bullying, harassment or discrimination normally go straight to the formal stage, and that exception is worth writing into the procedure.
What happens if the complaint is about the employee's own line manager?
The procedure needs a second entry point, which is what the opening 'Grievance concerns the line manager?' decision provides. The Yes branch sends the grievance directly to HR; in other organisations it might go to the manager's manager or a named senior contact. It then joins the same logged acknowledgement as any other complaint, so the routing changes but the timescales and the record do not. The same principle applies further along: the informal meeting should be facilitated by an impartial manager rather than the person complained about, and the investigator and the appeal decision-maker must both have been uninvolved in the events.
How long should an employee complaint take?
There is no single fixed timetable; the expectation is that the employer deals with the matter promptly and without unreasonable delay. In the UK the Acas Code of Practice on disciplinary and grievance procedures sets that expectation, and an employment tribunal can adjust compensation by up to 25% where an employer has unreasonably failed to follow it. Common practice is to acknowledge within about five working days, hold the hearing within one to two weeks of the written grievance, and confirm the outcome in writing within roughly a week of the hearing. Whatever figures you settle on, put them on the chart and start the clock from the logged receipt date rather than from when someone opens the file.
When does an employee complaint become a whistleblowing matter?
A grievance is normally about the employee's own treatment. It becomes a whistleblowing matter when the disclosure concerns wrongdoing that goes wider — a criminal offence, a breach of a legal obligation, a health and safety danger, environmental damage, or the concealment of any of these — and the person raising it reasonably believes the disclosure is in the public interest. In the UK that distinction decides whether the protections introduced by the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 apply. The two are not mutually exclusive: one complaint can be both, which is why the chart escalates under the duty of care to senior management and then returns to the investigation rather than swapping the grievance for a different process.