Is AI Bloating Employee Grievances, or Changing How They’re Written?

AI is changing employment disputes in the real world. Employees now have easy access to tools that can help them draft grievances, appeals and potentially claims, creating a new challenge for those tasked with managing HR processes.

You must have noticed it: employees submitting increasingly lengthy complaints, using unusual phrasing or language you might not ordinarily expect from them. These extensive documents are creating significant additional work and can leave HR teams feeling overwhelmed before an investigation has even begun.

There are, however, ways to regain control of the process.

AI tools are freely available and, for some employees, may feel like an accessible alternative when legal services are outside their reach. There are also situations where their use can provide genuine assistance, for example, helping someone with a visual impairment or an employee who does not speak English as a first language to articulate their concerns.

The difficulty arises when AI goes beyond helping someone communicate their complaint and starts bolstering it with page after page of additional information. Where do you begin an investigation when you cannot easily identify what the grievance is actually telling you? And what do you do with references to legislation or case law that may be American, irrelevant or simply non-existent?

These are increasingly real questions for HR teams. So, how should employers respond?

We will be exploring these issues in greater detail during our upcoming webinar, Healing the Headache of AI-Assisted Grievances, on Thursday 26 November which can be booked here. In the meantime, there are four practical points employers can consider when faced with an AI-assisted complaint.

Book your place

1. Don’t panic and don’t bite back

When faced with a lengthy, possibly AI-assisted grievance, it can be tempting to fight back with more AI and more lengthy documents. Try to resist this and remain in control of the process.

Remember that the longest documents are not necessarily the best or most well argued. It is not your job as an employer to engage in legal argument, whether real or AI hallucinated. Your role is to identify the issues, investigate them and reach an outcome. There is still considerable merit in keeping things straightforward and to the point.

You should also consider whether the employee will feed your response back into AI. The more succinct you can be, the more control you can retain. Contrast this with feeding an ever-growing mushroom cloud of AI-generated documented drama.

2. Meet with the employee hiding behind the AI

A notable feature of AI is its propensity to agree with the person inputting the information and produce a very one-sided account. While this is common with complaints, because everyone naturally sees events from their own perspective, the use of AI can amplify it.

Meeting with the employee, face to face where possible, can help break down what the complaint is really about. What do they say happened? When did it happen? Who was involved? And, importantly, what do they want you to do about it?

It is this information, told in their own words, that should form the basis of your investigation.

3. Don’t get lost in the detail

The apparent complexity or sheer length of a grievance should not mean that you lose sight of your usual process. Your own grievance policy should tell you how to proceed.

The ACAS Code of Practice must also be followed, with potential consequences for compensation where it is not. The fundamentals remain the same: investigate, keep records, remain impartial and confirm outcomes in line with your usual process.

AI might have changed the document in front of you. It does not mean that the basic principles of handling a grievance have disappeared.

4. Consider where the boundaries sit

You may already have an AI policy in place, or guidance may sit alongside other policies covering IT, data or security. Either way, the use of AI within grievance and other HR processes should not be overlooked.

Employers may want to consider when and where employees can use AI tools, which platforms are deemed safe and acceptable, and what information can be entered into open systems. That might include names of managers, colleagues being complained about or other potentially sensitive information.

The privacy repercussions can be significant, particularly where people use AI tools without fully understanding what information they are releasing by doing so.

There is an important balance here, however. If employees are permitted to use AI within their roles, or the organisation itself is using AI without appropriate guardrails, it will be difficult to restrict its use simply because an employee is deploying it to help bring a grievance or claim.

Any policy therefore needs to be consistent across AI usage, not simply restrictive when its use becomes inconvenient for the employer.

Is AI actually the problem?

There is perhaps a wider question here. Is AI creating a new grievance problem, or is it just changing how an existing problem presents itself?

Employees may have always sought help when preparing grievances, whether from colleagues, family members, trade unions or legal advisers. AI is another form of assistance, but one that is instantly available and capable of producing considerable volumes of apparently authoritative material within seconds.

That creates a different challenge for HR. The presentation of the complaint can become more complex, but the underlying issue may not be. A lengthy document filled with legal language does not necessarily mean that the grievance itself is legally or factually complex.

For HR teams, this arguably makes separating the presentation of a grievance from its substance increasingly important. Whatever has been used to draft the document, the task remains to understand what the employee says has happened, establish the relevant facts and follow a fair process.

Perhaps, then, the developing challenge is not simply how employers identify the use of AI, but how HR processes remain effective when employees increasingly use it.

The headache isn’t going away

AI-assisted grievances are unlikely to disappear. For HR teams, the challenge is therefore not to get drawn into an escalating exchange of increasingly lengthy AI-generated documents, but to retain control of the process and identify the actual issues requiring investigation.

There are also wider questions that employers need to consider around AI policies, privacy, investigations and how HR processes should adapt as these tools become increasingly commonplace.

We will explore these issues in greater detail during our upcoming webinar, Healing the Headache of AI-Assisted Grievances, on Thursday 26 November.

The session will consider how to identify AI-assisted complaints, what to do when you receive one, how to deal with employees hiding behind AI-generated submissions and the practical steps organisations can take through their policies and procedures. There will also be an opportunity to put questions directly to Becky during the live Q&A.

Book your place