How to appeal and write an appeal letter if you have been dismissed; redundancy or disciplinary. HR Solver: how to write a compelling appeal letter to change any decision made against you, disciplinary dismissal or redundancy dismissal, which lets face it could be affecting your life and income for good.
So in this video I am going to teach you how to appeal a decision, because even just for case building and financial reasons its worth doing and doing properly.
Firstly, I am going to give you an overview of what to include in your letter through creating sections headings and also discuss, what points to make if it’s redundancy appeal you’re drafting as that’s slightly different. And finally I will talk you through the key tips for getting to the essence of your appeal points and how to handle the appeal meeting.
Point 1- So when brainstorming and drafting your letter, the sections you should include;
The Processual issues. By this I mean; Suspension, timeline problems, investigation approach, evidence relied upon and you might actually have a subheading for each of those points and then another section heading for the actual decision and here you’d be outlining why the decision taken was disproportionate, why mitigation was not considered, by mitigation I mean any points you made in your disciplinary to explain your actions and issues with that given the actual case. In the suspension subheading for example you might be writing about how you were suspended and another colleague was not and how this is unfair or this colleague then had the opportunity to tamper with evidence or speak with key witnesses.
My second point is related to a redundancy appeal, clearly you don’t need to be talking about suspension in a redundancy appeal by the heading, processual issues is still relevant and you might replace the heading related to decision making with ‘business case for redundancy’.
If you are appealing your redundancy the key to doing this correctly is remember that not only the process for consultation needs to have been sound, i.e. no preconceived decision taken before proper true consultation, also known as ‘meaningful consultation’, was entered into with staff, but that the business decisions was actually valid. Redundancy in the eyes of the law is only justifiable as a last resort after all other avenues have been explored by an employer and that redundancy is legitimately needed because of the financial position of the company. It can’t be purely because the CEO wakes up one day and decides he wants to make redundancies. The only other way a redundancy might be achieved legitimately is if there is a restructuring because of a change of strategy or circumstances. For example we’re making less of this product now and so need less people in these jobs lets say, gluing, but instead we need an increased no. of jobs in sewing because the new product requires more sewing. But clearly before you are made redundant because you are a gluer they’d need to explore with you the sewing jobs and offer these to you before making you redundant. Really the right thing to do would also to be offering re-training