Summary

Involving lawyers in investigation and disciplinary processes is often perceived as essential, but stressful.

This chapter explores why employment lawyers act as they do, expanding upon their key roles as Outsider, Protector and Politician.

Developing a better understanding of lawyers’ perspectives highlights the need for a balance between organizational compassion, pragmatism and legal foresight.

Introduction

This chapter explores why employment lawyers and other employment specialists may act as they do.

The term ‘lawyer’ is used to cover the wide spectrum of specialists who may advise on employment law issues, but are not necessarily qualified as a lawyer.

When an employee investigation starts, human resources (HR) may communicate with the organization's lawyers early on or wait until after an investigating officer has conducted it.

Control of the process is relinquished to some extent to a lawyer when they become involved. Their involvement can be perceived as essential, but also a cause of conflict and stress.

Interprofessional conflict and stress can also arise in situations where HR would like the lawyers to take a more active role in the process. They may not understand the lawyer's reasoning for not intervening more.

Lawyers may advise on relevant processes and issues, but it is unlikely they would be present at a grievance or disciplinary hearing. It is important that any decision by an investigating officer is taken according to that decision maker's own rationale.

Summary

An effective occupational health and wellbeing approach to the management of disciplinary issues should be systematic. This chapter discusses three levels of intervention as part of such a systematic approach.

It includes a focus on prevention to remove or mitigate harmful factors in the working environment, alongside interventions that support individuals involved in the process and those who are in distress because of it.

The roles of human resources and occupational health are discussed, both in relation to employee health and wellbeing generally and employee investigations in particular.

Introduction

Work- related health and wellbeing continue to be an issue for organizations and individuals alike.

For 2023– 2024, the Health and Safety Executive (2024) reported 776,000 cases of work- related stress, depression or anxiety in the UK. This was equivalent to the loss of 16.4 million working days – half of all the days lost due to work- related ill- health.

Traditionally, occupational health (OH) has primarily focused on biological or physical health, which has meant an emphasis on immunization, preventing industrial injury (exposure to dangerous workplace elements such as heat or chemicals) and supporting workers who had been physically injured at work.

However, over the past 20 years, OH has placed an increased focus on mental health as well. This has been in response to a growth in mental and psychological health needs in the workplace – mirroring how work has changed in a post- industrial era. Research has indicated that occupational health and wellbeing (more especially the wellbeing component) has become a major factor driving workplace performance, retention and quality (Cox et al, 2000).

In drawing this book to a close, I would like to return to my starting point – specifically, the quote by Nathan Gerard that a new and engaged critique of HRM must, in part, be premised upon the fuller recognition of the human. I hope that this book has provided a rich, psychoanalytically informed account as to how we might understand the human that often seems to be removed from HRM both as a body of theory and as a field of practice. But this view of an essentially divided, desiring, conflicted human revealed by psychoanalysis does not dovetail well with the nostrums of unitarist management approaches which lie at the heart of HRM models and ideas. Indeed, I would argue that the view of the human as revealed by psychoanalysis poses a challenge not only for HRM but also for much management theory and practice, which places such heavy emphasis on rationality, control, stability, forecasting, planning, productivity and so on. Much of the book highlights that the failure by HRM to attend to the human aspect of HRM has had some awful consequences for many workers. Chapter 5's account of the crise de travail in France also provides additional, powerful testimony, as does Yiannis Gabriel's leadership case study of organizational miasma explored in Chapter 7.

Introduction

In August 2005, the business magazine Fast Company published an article which received wide- ranging comments within HRM and management circles and still resonates (Hammonds, 2005). Entitled ‘Why we hate HR’, the magazine's deputy editor Keith Hammonds presented a damning critique of the HR function's pretensions to strategic influence in business organizations. Hammonds argued that HR managers contributed little to organizational performance and remained fixated on bureaucratic procedures and administrative minutiae. He painted a bleak picture for the future of HRM, concluding that the few things HR was good at (usually administrative) could be outsourced, and that the strategic contribution HR managers sought was well beyond their capabilities. As noted by Paauwe, Wright and Guest (2013), for over 50 years, personnel managers have tried to move beyond a welfare and administrative conceptualization of their roles to a more central and strategic position in the running of the business, trying to convince others of the value the function brings to the firm. This strategic ‘push’ has met with mixed success as attempts at increasing the function's status and recognition as a key managerial profession have frequently been rebuffed by senior managers from rival functional backgrounds (Roper and Higgins, 2020).

Introduction

This chapter explores the devolution of routine HRM work (for example, recruitment and selection, performance management, training and development, and disciplinary and grievance activities) from the HRM function to the line manager. The devolution of HRM is now an established feature of many contemporary firms, allegedly allowing the HRM function to work more closely on what is termed ‘strategic’ tasks. However, this shift is not without its controversies some 40 years after its instigation. A psychoanalytic reading of devolution allows an interrogation of what this process means by asking what ‘role’ the line manager occupies to those they manage and why this might be problematic not simply from an organizational/ organizing perspective but also from an unconscious, affective one. Parker (2004) makes the point that there is a great deal of literature which looks at the managerial job from the ‘outside’ as well as a large body of (ghostwritten) autobiographies of heroic managers who have allegedly changed the world.