Letter requesting employee to attend first formal disciplinary hearing for unauthorised absence

What is a request to attend a formal disciplinary hearing for unauthorised absence and when should you use it?

Use this letter to request an employee to attend a disciplinary meeting for unauthorised absence in circumstances where the employee has failed to respond to a written request.

A protracted unauthorised absence could be considered gross misconduct.

‘Gross misconduct’ is far more serious than other forms of employee misconduct.

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 Disciplinary Hub.

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

If you find that the unauthorised absence warrants a verbal warning only, you should issue a further letter to the employee after the informal meeting advising them of the verbal warning.

To do this you can use our Disciplinary verbal warning letter about absence

If you consider their absence to justify a written warning, then we have a template for that too Disciplinary written warning letter about absence