You know the story, there’s a disagreement about workload, or someone is given a clumsy piece of feedback, or a rota change is delivered without explanation. Within days, instead of a conversation with the line manager, there is a formal grievance in HR's inbox. Not long after, a data subject access request lands: every email, message and note that mentions the employee, to be located, reviewed, redacted and disclosed within a month. Investigators are appointed, meetings minuted, appeals heard. Months later the original issue, which might have taken twenty minutes to resolve, has consumed hundreds of hours, and nobody is talking about it any more because everyone is talking about the process.
It is tempting to read this as a story about difficult people, or about a "grievance culture" imported from somewhere else. The research suggests something less comfortable. People run to HR when the informal route has been made to look slower, riskier or less fair than the formal one. That is rarely an accident of individual temperament. It is the predictable result of how the organisation has been designed, the way it works, its HR function and its procedures. Which is good news, because it means it can be redesigned.
What is actually happening
The scale of the problem is not in doubt. Acas research led by Richard Saundry and Peter Urwin put the annual cost of workplace conflict to UK employers at £28.5 billion, or more than £1,000 for every employee, with close to ten million people experiencing conflict in a typical year. The single most important finding in that analysis is that the cost of a conflict handled through formal procedure is more than three times the cost of one resolved informally.
Acas's latest survey related to this topic, published in November 2025 and based on 4,558 respondents, found that 44% of working adults in Great Britain had experienced conflict at work in the previous year, the highest level ever recorded in a British survey of this kind. Only half of those conflicts were substantially resolved. Nearly a third were mainly or completely unresolved. Of significance is that in 35% of cases where a manager was in conflict with one of their own reports, the manager took no action at all.
There is a disconnect. The CIPD's 2020 study Managing Conflict in the Modern Workplace, which surveyed 2,211 employees and 1,016 employers, found that 76% of employers thought they managed conflict adequately and 69% said their procedures were effective. However, only 46% of employees agreed that the procedures worked. Apparently, 53% of those who had experienced bullying or harassment never reported it at all. That gap, between what leaders think their system does and what employees experience it doing, is where the escalation problem lives.
One point of terminology matters here, because it shapes the legal response. What most private-sector employers experience is not a freedom of information request, which applies only to public authorities, but a data subject access request under Article 15 of the UK GDPR. The distinction is not pedantic. FOI requests can be refused on cost grounds; a subject access request largely cannot. The Information Commissioner's Office has been explicit that an employer cannot refuse a request because a grievance or tribunal claim is in progress, that the "manifestly unfounded" exemption is narrow, and that the deadline is one month, extendable by two only for genuinely complex requests. The ICO received 15,848 complaints about subject access requests in a single year. The tool is powerful, it is cheap for the employee, and it is expensive for the employer. However, if you treat these requests for information as an abuse to be resisted rather than a signal to be understood you are destined for a world where people are inwardly focused on processing the data to be shared rather than on the performance of the business.
Why do people choose to run to HR?
Five mechanisms, each well evidenced, combine to push people past their manager and into the formal system.
The manager is often the problem, not the solution.
In the Acas 2025 data, 32% of all workplace conflict was with the line manager or supervisor, and 38% concerned capability or performance. Advice to "work it through with your manager" assumes the manager is a neutral party. In a third of cases they are the other side. Jim Detert and Amy Edmondson, writing in the Academy of Management Journal in 2011, identified a set of "implicit voice theories": unspoken rules people carry about when speaking up is dangerous. Two of the strongest are "don't bypass the boss" and "speaking up has career consequences." Employees know that going over their manager's head is a norm violation. They do it anyway when they conclude the manager is either the source of the problem or incapable of fixing it. From the employee's perspective, escalation is not impulsive. It is a calculation that the informal route is a waste of time or simply not possible.
People go where they expect to be heard.
Four decades of procedural justice research, beginning with John Thibaut and Laurens Walker and developed by Allan Lind and Tom Tyler, show that people care as much about the fairness of the process as about the outcome, and that the single strongest driver of perceived fairness is voice: the sense that one's account was genuinely listened to by someone with the power to act. Jason Colquitt's 2001 work in the Journal of Applied Psychology separated this into procedural, interpersonal and informational justice, and found each independently predicts trust and commitment. A grievance procedure offers guaranteed voice. It comes with a hearing, a note-taker, a right to be accompanied and a right of appeal. A conversation with a manager who is distracted, defensive or simply absent offers none of that. When the informal channel is low on interpersonal and informational justice, the formal channel's procedural justice becomes the rational choice, even at high personal cost.
Managers have been trained to be afraid.
The most important British research on this, by Carol Jones and Richard Saundry, describes a "crisis of confidence" among front-line managers. Their interviews found managers whose only conflict training was "ten screens of a PowerPoint presentation," who believed that "if they dabble in some sort of informal approach they might get it wrong," and who had learned that "the safest course of action was simply to sweep issues under the carpet." Andrew Sutherland's 2024 Acas study reached the same conclusion: under-trained managers "avoid conflict and tackle problems by rigidly applying procedures rather than seeking mutually beneficial solutions," and organisational policies focus disproportionately on investigation rather than resolution. A manager who is overloaded, under-trained and frightened of litigation will not have the difficult conversation. The employee, sensing this, understandably, goes elsewhere.
HR has been restructured out of the room.
Jones and Saundry's second finding is the one CHROs find hardest to hear. The shift to business partner models, shared services and remote HR advice removed the on-site HR practitioner whose door a manager could knock on. Trust between managers and HR eroded; managers became more dependent on written guidance, not less; and HR, despite rhetorical support for informal resolution, prioritised risk minimisation and procedural compliance. Under perceived threat, organisations centralise control, restrict information and fall back on well-learned routines. A tribunal claim is a threat; the routine is the procedure; the procedure becomes the default. Employees learn that the procedure is what HR responds to, so the procedure is what they invoke.
The formal route has become cheap to enter and expensive to leave.
William Ury, Jeanne Brett and Stephen Goldberg's classic work on dispute systems design distinguishes three ways of resolving conflict: reconciling interests, determining who is right, and determining who is more powerful. A healthy system resolves most disputes on interests, some on rights, few on power. A "distressed" system inverts the pyramid. The UK's current legal environment tilts firmly towards rights and power. The Employment Rights Act 2025 extends the tribunal time limit from three to six months from October 2026 and, from 1 January 2027, cuts the unfair dismissal qualifying period from two years to six months and removes the compensation cap. Employment tribunals had 531,000 open claims at the end of March 2026, with receipts running at twice the rate of disposals. None of this is an argument against the reforms. It is an observation that the rights-based route is becoming more accessible and more valuable at exactly the moment the interests-based route inside most organisations is at its weakest.
It gets worse. Research by Wendy Boswell and Julie Olson-Buchanan in the Academy of Management Journal found that employees who filed formal grievances after mistreatment showed greater subsequent withdrawal, not less: higher intent to leave, more absence, lower engagement. Formal process, in other words, does not typically resolve the underlying relationship. It documents its breakdown. The organisation pays for the procedure and then pays again for the resignation.
What it costs, beyond the obvious
The direct costs are visible: HR time, management time and legal fees. The hidden cost is what the Acas data shows about focus. When 45% of employees who experience conflict discuss it with their manager and only 13% go to HR, the formal caseload is a minority of the whole. But it absorbs the majority of HR attention, because it is the part that generates documents and deadlines. An HR function consumed by grievance investigations and subject access requests is not building manager capability, redesigning work, or noticing the team where three people are quietly looking for jobs. The symptom crowds out the cause.
Michele Gelfand and colleagues' 2012 study of "conflict cultures" in the Journal of Applied Psychology adds the leadership dimension. Leaders' own conflict styles propagate through their units. Avoidant leaders create avoidant cultures, and avoidant cultures are associated with lower unit viability and higher burnout. An executive team that handles its own disagreements by routing them through process rather than conversation should not be surprised to find the same behaviour three levels down.
Preventing it: designing for interests first
The organisations that Jones and Saundry found handling conflict well shared four features:
- high-trust relationships between HR, managers and employee representatives;
- a positive employee relations climate rather than a grievance culture;
- real investment in conflict-resolution skills; and
- senior leaders who gave managers time, space and permission to get it wrong.
So, what to do:
First, redefine the manager's job so that resolving conflict early is explicitly in it, resourced and measured. If a manager with fourteen reports and a full delivery load cannot find forty minutes for a difficult conversation, the conversation will not happen, and the grievance will take root. Reduce spans, remove administrative load, or accept the formal caseload as the price.
Second, train for the conversation, not the procedure. The evidence is consistent that compliance training makes managers more cautious, not more capable. What builds confidence is practised skill: structured listening, separating the person from the problem, naming interests rather than positions, and knowing what informal resolution actually looks like in practice, which Sutherland found most managers could not describe. This should be experiential, repeated and coached, not a half-day module.
Third, put HR back in the room. The business partner model does not need abandoning, but the coaching function does need restoring. Every manager should have a named HR contact who will pick up the phone, talk through a live situation, and back an informal resolution rather than default to "put it in writing." Jones and Saundry's data is unambiguous that this relationship, more than any policy, determines whether managers attempt early resolution.
Fourth, redesign the procedure so that the informal stage is real. Most grievance policies contain a sentence encouraging informal resolution and then twelve pages on the formal process. Rewrite the balance. Specify what an informal stage involves:
- who facilitates it,
- how long it takes, and
- what the employee can expect.
Offer mediation early, by trained internal mediators, before positions harden. The CIPD found that just 2% of employees in conflict had used mediation. The Acas Code of Practice on Disciplinary and Grievance Procedures, which tribunals use to adjust awards by up to 25%, actively supports early informal resolution; a well-designed informal stage is a legal asset, not a risk.
Fifth, and most important, model it from the top. Gelfand's work means this literally. If the executive team resolves its own disputes by conversation, and is seen to, the organisation's conflict culture shifts. If it escalates, delegates and documents, so will everyone else.
How to stem the tide
An organisation with a rising formal caseload and a queue of subject access requests needs a different sequence, because trust has already been spent.
Start with a diagnosis, not a policy. Pull the last two years of grievances and requests and map them: which teams, which managers, which issues, at what point did the employee first try the informal route and what happened. In most organisations the caseload is concentrated. A handful of managers or one function generates the majority. That is not a reason for blame; it is a reason for targeted intervention, because the wider organisation's managers are probably fine.
Triage the live cases on interests. For every open grievance, ask whether the employee has yet had a real conversation with someone senior, neutral and empowered. If not, offer one, without prejudice to the formal process. Many employees will accept, because most did not want the procedure; they wanted to be heard. Offer mediation in parallel. Where a case must run formally, run it fast: delay is the single biggest driver of the withdrawal that Boswell and Olson-Buchanan documented.
Handle subject access requests as a signal and a discipline, not a battle. Comply, on time, and treat what the disclosed material reveals about how the employee was discussed as management information. If managers' emails about staff would be embarrassing to disclose, the problem is not the request. Invest in a repeatable process and tooling so that each request costs days, not weeks, and stop spending legal fees arguing about motive; the ICO has made clear motive rarely matters.
Reset HR's posture visibly. The message managers need to hear, from the CHRO and in public, is that early informal resolution is expected, that they will be supported when they attempt it, and that a resolution which is fair but undocumented is preferable to a procedure which is documented but unfair. Then demonstrate it with the first three cases.
Finally, tell the organisation what is changing and why. Employees who have learned that only the formal route works will not unlearn it from a policy update. They will unlearn it when they see a colleague raise something with a manager, get a proper hearing, and get a fair answer within a week. Procedural justice research says that experience, repeated a few times, rebuilds trust faster than any communication campaign. It is also, per Acas's arithmetic, roughly a third of the price.
Dr Dominic Irvine
References
Acas (2021). Estimating the costs of workplace conflict. Research by R. Saundry and P. Urwin. London: Acas.
Acas (2025). How prevalent is individual conflict at work in Great Britain in 2025? Survey conducted by the National Centre for Social Research. London: Acas.
Acas (2015). Code of Practice on Disciplinary and Grievance Procedures. London: Acas.
Boswell, W. R. and Olson-Buchanan, J. B. (2004). Experiencing mistreatment at work: The role of grievance filing, nature of mistreatment, and employee withdrawal. Academy of Management Journal, 47(1), 129–139.
CIPD (2020). Managing Conflict in the Modern Workplace. London: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.
Colquitt, J. A. (2001). On the dimensionality of organizational justice: A construct validation of a measure. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(3), 386–400.
Detert, J. R. and Edmondson, A. C. (2011). Implicit voice theories: Taken-for-granted rules of self-censorship at work. Academy of Management Journal, 54(3), 461–488.
Gartner (2024). Managers Are Cracking — And More Training Won't Help. Stamford, CT: Gartner.
Gelfand, M. J., Leslie, L. M., Keller, K. and de Dreu, C. (2012). Conflict cultures in organizations: How leaders shape conflict cultures and their organizational-level consequences. Journal of Applied Psychology, 97(6), 1131–1147.
Information Commissioner's Office (2024). Employment practices and data protection: Information about workers' health; and guidance on responding to subject access requests from workers. Wilmslow: ICO.
Jones, C. and Saundry, R. (2016). A crisis of confidence? Front-line managers and the complexities of conflict. In R. Saundry, P. Latreille and I. Ashman (eds), Reframing Resolution: Innovation and Change in the Management of Workplace Conflict. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lind, E. A. and Tyler, T. R. (1988). The Social Psychology of Procedural Justice. New York: Plenum.
Ministry of Justice (2026). Tribunal Statistics Quarterly: January to March 2026. London: MoJ.
Sitkin, S. B. and Bies, R. J. (1993). The legalistic organization: Definitions, dimensions, and dilemmas. Organization Science, 4(3), 345–351.
Staw, B. M., Sandelands, L. E. and Dutton, J. E. (1981). Threat-rigidity effects in organizational behavior: A multilevel analysis. Administrative Science Quarterly, 26(4), 501–524.
Sutherland, A. (2024). Line manager handling of discipline and grievance: A barrier to resolution? London: Acas.
Thibaut, J. and Walker, L. (1975). Procedural Justice: A Psychological Analysis. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
UK Parliament (2025). Employment Rights Act 2025, and associated commencement regulations (2026).
Ury, W. L., Brett, J. M. and Goldberg, S. B. (1988). Getting Disputes Resolved: Designing Systems to Cut the Costs of Conflict. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.