Most HR problems in small businesses don’t arrive as a formal grievance on headed paper. They arrive as a long message, sent late in the evening, from someone who has clearly been turning it over for months.
And very often, somewhere in the middle of it, there’s a line like this:
“I don’t want any drama or formal processes. I’d just like us to move forward.”
If you’re running a business without an HR department, that sentence is enormously tempting. Someone has handed you a difficult problem and an escape route in the same breath. They may even have told you exactly what would fix it.
Here’s why you can’t take the escape route, and what to do instead.
Once you know, you can’t un-know
Some things an employer has to look into once it’s aware of them. Allegations that a manager is bullying or intimidating staff are squarely in that category, and so is anything that touches on harassment or discrimination.
An employee chooses how to raise a concern. They don’t get to choose whether the employer responds to it, and that isn’t a technicality. It’s what protects everyone else who works there.
Worth knowing: since October 2026, employers are also liable for harassment of their staff by third parties, and must take all reasonable steps to prevent it. So if the person causing the problem is a contractor, a customer, or a supplier rather than an employee, that doesn’t take it off your shoulders. If anything, it’s the part employers are least prepared for.
Fixing it with a pay rise is the worst evidence you can create
This is the one that stops owners in their tracks.
Imagine you agree to what’s been asked for. The person is happy, everyone moves on, nothing more is said. Now imagine that eighteen months later the relationship has broken down and someone asks what you did when you were told a manager was mistreating a member of staff.
“We gave her a pay rise and moved her to a different team.”
That isn’t a defence. It reads as an employer that paid to avoid looking at a problem. And the message they sent you, the careful, reasonable one where they set it all out, is now the most damaging document in the file.
Moving the person who complained is not a solution
It’s a common request, and an entirely understandable one. Someone wants to be moved away from the person causing them difficulty.
But if you grant it and do nothing else, you’ve relocated the individual and left the behaviour exactly where it was. The next person inherits it. And you’ve now got a record showing you were told and chose the path of least resistance.
The bit almost everyone gets wrong
Sooner or later the pay question comes up, and the instinct is to say there’ll be no pay review until all this is resolved.
Don’t say it that way.
“You complained, so your pay review is on hold” is a detriment. A detriment that follows someone raising a complaint is victimisation, and that’s a claim in its own right, entirely separate from whether the original complaint had any merit.
The same decision, framed properly, is completely defensible:
Your pay and grading will be assessed objectively, based on what your role actually involves and how it compares with others, and we’ll come back to you with the outcome and our reasoning. What we can’t do is agree it as part of settling your complaint, because that wouldn’t be fair to you or to anyone else.
Same practical answer. Entirely different complexion if it’s ever read out.
There’s a related trap. People often admit something small about their own conduct when they raise a complaint: a bit of lateness, a process they haven’t been following. Act on it now, and it will look like retaliation, whatever your intention. Deal with it properly, later, once the dust has settled.
What good actually looks like
Separate the strands. A complaint about someone’s behaviour, a question about pay, and an argument about how work is allocated are different problems. They don’t get one answer. Bundling them together is precisely how you end up giving a pay rise to close down a bullying complaint.
Work out who can look into it. Not the person complained about, and not anyone who reports to them. And the one thing people forget: keep one senior person entirely clear of the whole thing, so there’s somebody credible left to hear an appeal. In a small business, that takes thinking ahead, not reacting on the day.
Check what came before. Ask whether anything similar has been raised previously, and what happened to it. If a concern was mentioned months ago and nothing was done, the clock on “we acted promptly” started a lot earlier than you think. Far better to know that before you write a word.
Say it in plain English. Acknowledge the complaint. Explain honestly why an informal fix isn’t available; you will find people generally accept that when they understand the reason. Confirm they won’t be treated differently for having raised it. Set out who is doing what, and by when.
Be generous where you can be. If there’s something they’ve asked for that’s entirely separate from the complaint, has been promised before, and costs very little, confirm it, separately, and say why. Good faith is cheap when you’re not using it to buy silence.
The point
When someone tells you they don’t want to make a fuss, they aren’t giving you permission to do nothing. Usually it means they’ve decided to trust you with the truth and they’re frightened of what happens next.
What you do in the following fortnight decides whether this is a difficult few weeks or something you’re still dealing with two years from now.
In my experience, the businesses that get this wrong are almost never the ones that didn’t care. They’re the ones that cared a great deal, wanted to keep things friendly, and hadn’t realised that being kind and being thorough are the same job.
If someone has just handed you something and you’re not sure what to do with it, that’s the day to pick up the phone, not six months later.
I provide outsourced HR support to small and growing businesses across Leicestershire, the Midlands and the wider UK. Practical, plain English, and no 47-page policies nobody reads.
Louise Binning FCIPD — ECL People Solutions
