Meliesha Jones, who was a part-time administrator at Vale Curtains and Blinds in Oxford since May 2021, was dealing with a customer complaint when she accidentally forwarded the email to the customer rather than reply to a colleague.
She wrote: “Hi Karl - Can you change this… he’s a twat so it doesn’t matter if you can’t.”
She was sacked for gross misconduct in June 2023, a week after she had sent the message to the customer instead of the company’s installations manager Karl Gibbons, an employment tribunal in Reading heard.
Ms Jones was awarded £5,484.74 after the tribunal ruled she had been unfairly dismissed.
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Shortly after she had sent the message, the customer’s wife rang and asked: “Is there any reason why you called my husband a twat?”
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The tribunal heard that a probe took place and the company decided there also had to be a disciplinary hearing.
But the tribunal heard neither Ms Jones nor the customer was interviewed, no notes were produced by Mrs Smith and no written account of the decision was made.
The customer had contacted the company directly and made further threats about publicising the incident, in particular by leaving a poor review on Trustpilot and bosses decided to “get rid of” Ms Jones.
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Employment Judge Akua Reindorf KC said: “I conclude from the evidence before me that the principal reason for this decision was that the customer and his wife had made threats to publicise the claimant’s email in the press, social media and/or Trustpilot.”
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The judge said: "The disciplinary process and the dismissal were a sham designed to placate the customer.
“This is clear from the fact that Mrs Smith immediately informed the customer that [Ms Jones] had been dismissed - notably, without any apparent regard for the claimant’s data protection rights.”
She added the company had “decided to sacrifice the claimant’s employment for the sake of appeasing the customer and heading off bad reviews, and wholly unreasonably failed to consider other more proportionate ways of achieving the same outcome”.
Exactly.
If you have a workplace culture where you’re emailing backwards and forwards calling the customers names and that’s seen as totally acceptable workplace ‘banter’ then of course it’s going to go wrong sooner or later.
The blame is equally as much on the management for allowing and normalising that behaviour, and the tribunal recognised that.