My best HR management idea: Unusual open-door policy reduced disputes – and lawsuits

HR specialist Patrick Cont wanted to avoid employee lawsuits. He thought of many ways to make it easier for workers to resolve disputes without suing the company. But he still hadn’t found the right solution. Here’s how he fixed the problem.
As part of an ongoing series, we’ll have practicing HR managers present real problems they faced and how they solved them.
A company we were advising wanted to give employees more ways to resolve disputes without filing a lawsuit. But there was one problem or another with all the usual alternatives.
A lot of companies have had success with management/employee boards, for example. But having a board usually means you give up at-will employment. We didn’t want to do that. So we decided on something out of the box: an open-door policy involving several senior managers.
No direct authority
The idea was to give employees another channel for complaints – a person who did not have immediate supervisory authority. That helped diminish employees’ perception that the deck was stacked against them.
Any employee could contact a designated open-door manager in person, by phone or by e-mail. The process was deliberately informal. We tried to avoid written reports, unless the problem didn’t get solved and threatened to get worse.
There was a danger that workers would try to play open-door managers against their direct supervisors, of course. But that didn’t happen. As a result, the client solved several disputes informally that might have generated lawsuits a year ago.
(Patrick Cont, Esq.; Edwards, Ballard, Sturm, Clark, and Keim, P.A.; Spartanburg, SC)