Thirty years of service could not save sales director dismissed over harassment findings

In December 2024, a sales director who had climbed the ranks at a construction materials company over nearly three decades walked into what he expected to be an ordinary one-to-one with the managing director. Instead, a People Partner was sitting there too, and he was told serious concerns had been raised about his conduct towards a junior female colleague.

The concerns centred on incidents during a business trip to France and a series of comments and invitations directed at the same colleague. He disputed the allegations, either denying them or saying his words had been taken out of context. An investigation was launched, and by the following spring he had lost his job.

The disciplinary invitation set out eleven allegations said to amount to sexual harassment under the company's policy. They ranged from a remark made after putting on surgical gloves during the France trip, to asking the colleague whether the colour of her hair matched elsewhere, calling her a pet name in front of another employee, inviting her to his caravan in Lincolnshire, and a cutting remark when she declined a dinner invitation.

The disciplinary officer found seven of the eleven allegations proven and concluded that summary dismissal for gross misconduct was the right sanction. In his outcome letter, he expressly weighed the man's long service and clean disciplinary record, but noted that he was a senior manager holding a position of seniority over the complainant, and that his actions had caused distress to a more junior employee.

The dismissed director appealed, and the appeal officer did something that later proved significant: she did not simply rubber-stamp the original decision. She overturned two of the findings, including the surgical gloves incident, but upheld the rest as proven acts of sexual harassment and dismissed the appeal.

The tribunal judge later treated that independence as a mark of a careful process. The appeal officer had interviewed additional witnesses, shared notes of further meetings with the complainant, and given the director the chance to respond before reaching her conclusion.

At the tribunal hearing, the director called a former direct report to give evidence on his behalf. It backfired badly. The witness, who had been on the call where the remark about hair was made, had been interviewed five times during the process without ever claiming he had said it himself. Months later, at the tribunal, he claimed for the first time that the comment was his, not the director's.

The judge found this explanation unravelled under questioning, noting that the man stuck to the same justification even after being reminded that the dismissal had already happened. A note the witness produced as corroboration of an earlier conversation was described as looking suspiciously like an attempt to manufacture evidence. Three call participants had said they heard the remark and that the director made it, and the judge concluded a reasonable employer would accept that account.

The director argued the investigation was flawed and that dismissal was harsh given his roughly thirty years of unblemished service. The tribunal disagreed. The judge found the investigation thorough, with multiple interviews including people the director himself had suggested, and found the employer's genuine belief in the misconduct was maintained on reasonable grounds.

The judge also rejected the argument that having five rather than seven allegations upheld made dismissal too severe. One upheld remark alone, with its degrading reference to a woman's body, was considered capable of amounting to gross misconduct justifying summary dismissal, as was a senior male employee inviting a junior colleague to his caravan. The judge noted the director himself accepted in submissions that standards of what is acceptable at work have changed.

The accounts of several colleagues who heard the remark appear to have carried real weight, which may illustrate why contemporaneous notes of what was said, when and in front of whom could matter in a dispute over workplace conduct.

The appeal outcome here was not a formality: two findings were overturned on appeal, which may suggest that engaging fully with each stage of an employer's process, and putting responses in writing, could shape what is ultimately upheld.

The tribunal found the employer had expressly weighed long service and a clean record before dismissing, so employees may wish to consider that length of service is one factor among several, and that findings involving conduct towards a more junior colleague may be treated as especially serious.