A FORMER BANK worker has secured a €6,600 compensation award from his former place of employment after arguing successfully that he had been over-promoted.
The man first began working with the financial institution in 2006, was swiftly promoted the following February and was made a permanent member of staff in December 2007.
Let go in August 2016, the bank contended that the man had only matched expectations in his yearly reviews on three occasions.
It said that it had engaged its Performance Improvement Process (PIP) in 2015 after a number of years of the man performing below the standards expected of him.
Seven meetings were organised with the man over the course of two months. The bank claimed that the man did not make sufficient progress in his duties over those two months and was issued with a formal verbal warning in April of that year.
The man was moved to stage two of the PIP. and a number of his duties were taken away from him in order for him to deal with his work backlog, after he complained of his workload being excessive.
No improvement
Still his work showed no improvement.
His workload was reduced even further for the following eight months, but still showed no improvement, and he was given a final written warning in January 2016.
He was finally dismissed from his position on 3 August 2016.
The man, for his part, said that the PIP was never agreed with his union because it considered it to be a flawed process, one it could not agree to.
He argued that the bank would normally only dismiss someone in the case of gross misconduct, which he was not guilty of.
His union said that his promotion to assistant manager, which he achieved after applying for it, was arrived at following a ‘flawed internal selection process’, and that he subsequently struggled in his new role.
‘Managed out of the business’
His representative said that the man should have been demoted, rather than ‘managed out of the business’.
Deciding on the matter, adjudication officer Jim Dolan concluded that the man had been unfairly dismissed, in that other options should have been available to the institution’s managers other than just dismissal or no dismissal.
However, he also said that the man had contributed to his own dismissal by not taking the performance improvement process seriously to begin with, and through his acknowledged ‘very poor performance’.
He said that, given the man had been unemployed for three months before securing a new job, one in which his salary was significantly higher, that the correct award of compensation was three months salary, then reduced by 50%, or €6,625.
He ordered the bank to pay the man that sum in compensation for his unfair dismissal.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say