Letter requesting an employee to attend a formal disciplinary hearing following an investigation

What is a letter requesting an employee to attend a formal disciplinary hearing following an investigation and when should you use it?

Use this letter to request an employee to attend a formal disciplinary meeting for misconduct or behaviour in circumstances where an investigation has been completed and the employee’s behaviour warrants disciplinary action.

Anything that counts as misbehaviour by an employee can be described as ‘misconduct’.

However, there are different types of misconduct that describe the various levels of seriousness: general misconduct (poor performance), serious misconduct, and gross misconduct.

If an employee does something that is so serious it destroys the employee-employer relationship, you’re able to dismiss them rapidly, without notice and without any pay instead of notice, as long as you follow a proper and fair process of dismissal.

Instant dismissal isn’t actually instant, though.

This kind of dismissal is often called a ‘summary dismissal’, but due to the legal need to still demonstrate a fair dismissal process, it’s rarely literally instant.

Your employment contract with the employee should make very clear what behaviour or activity constitutes ‘gross misconduct’ and is therefore worthy of this escalated dismissal treatment.

For good measure, you should add this definition into your employee handbook too.

What else might you need?

When it comes to handling any concerns with an employee’s behaviour you should be consulting your disciplinary policy, which sets out the procedure you should follow regarding any disciplinary matter.

We have a suite of letters which take you through the disciplinary process step by step and you can find these templates in our Employees hub

You should also check out our step by step guidance on handling a disciplinary issues with employees

After the first formal meeting you should issue either a first written warning letter or a final written warning letter to the employee.

This will depend on the level of misconduct.

Where there has been serious misconduct this may justify a final written warning letter straight away.

Use our final written warning letter for this

This letter should remain on their personnel file for up to 12 months.

If the misconduct has been general and relatively minor then you should use our first written warning letter.

Disciplinary first written warning letter about conduct or behaviour