When I was suspended in 2014 – escorted to my car by the Head of HR one afternoon in full view of the office where I had worked for six years – I did not know how horrific it would be.
I had never had a sick day and yet I did get sick. I was a great sleeper and yet I developed insomnia.
I loved food and yet my weight dropped to the lowest level since I was 14 years old.
It wasn’t until a friend located the NHS suspension website that it all began to make sense and I felt less alone and I started my recovery. I have spoken to the chief medical officer in my region and he agreed that a worker’s health is greatly impacted by suspension from work, with greater heart trouble and increased risk of suicide in his experience. Yet there is no hard data out there.
It took four months to unravel the story behind my suspension. My line manager and I had a difficult relationship, I was paying for coaching to try to make things better and I thought this was helping.
However he was keen to promote by second in command and he had formed close and trusting relationships with my staff and I was left out of much communication between them. During a difficult meeting with my second in command I was given shocking inaccurate information (which turned out to be false) and I reacted badly, and my line manager decided I was threatening my staff.
I was accused of being a bully and yet it appeared that I was being harassed – left out of key
conversations, information withheld, and ridiculed within my team because I was different from them. One particular member of staff disliked me greatly and had made sure that I wasn’t able to attend the team’s Christmas party. My line manager had the choice to implement the company’s Dignity at Work policy once tempers rose – especially while I was asking him and HR and my team what was actually going on – but instead he chose to suspend me. Once suspended, a big machine starts up. It is only natural for the company to start to put their resources into proving that they were ‘right’ to suspend someone, rather than face the embarrassment of an apology.
I was cleared by the first investigator, an HR consultant with almost 35 years of experience including 100+ disciplinary investigations. He said that I had done nothing wrong and it was important to reinstate me immediately. The next action my company took was to dismiss him and hire a second investigator. There was no regard taken of the ACAS requirement for a ‘brief’ suspension and this resulted in huge problems for me as the months went on. As the suspension continued and my health deteriorated, I had to find the courage and resources to keep fighting – without access to my emails and company documents (except if I could remember exactly when something was sent, and the HR officer could find it for me), completely isolated, and with legal costs growing to £28,000 after four months. I was being paid and yet each letter said ‘Gross Misconduct, if proved, could result in termination with no notice’ so I felt as though I had been thrown out of the cave, into the cold, with bits of food thrown out to me each month but everyone else in the cave working as a team to stop the food supply as soon as possible.
We all have good days and bad days. A suspension freezes a bad day in time and the employee is just stuck there, replaying the events over and over. Resolution of difficult situations comes through company policies and procedures, working with an employee to correct performance (or to ensure the employee exits the company), whereas a suspension just throws that employee to the wolves.
My situation is particularly extreme because my suspension coincided with a major bidding event, one which only happened every four years and upon which my expertise was based. I was continually advised by solicitors to not resign due to the difficulties of making a constructive dismissal case, and anyway I was keen to clear my name, but this meant that I couldn’t offer my services to any other company, to grow my expertise through participation in this event as part of a different company. I had not missed a single one of these bidding events since starting my career in this particular industry in 1991. Suspension means that you are held suspended in the air, unable to participate in your industry, forced to watch the world move by whilst your expertise is eroded (along with your confidence) and your contacts are taken over my colleagues. All my work contacts were directed to those who had complained about me, and I could do nothing to help myself. Loss of my expertise, reputation and my contact book meant that I would find it much harder to earn a living in the future and of course that only added to the great stress.
Yet there was nothing I could do. I was treated as the enemy by the company machine. I didn’t
really feel like I belonged to any organisation, all staff information was shut off to me and thus I did not receive even the ‘all staff’ emails that announced the appointment of our new CEO etc.
The isolation is truly difficult to describe – in some ways I even enjoyed the three days of disciplinary hearings because I was allowed to speak with colleagues!
I have taken action by writing a letter to ACAS, with my thoughts on possible changes to the ACAS Code of Practice. In particular I was taken with the recommendations from family members affected by suspension (on the NHS Suspension website – Impact on Family). I believe that suspensions should be no more than four weeks – unless in exceptional circumstances and with ACAS specific permission – because an employee can go back to work whilst the investigation continues unless something horrific is discovered within four weeks. I also believe that a suspension should be a Board level decision. That would have made a big difference in my case, where the decision to suspend was taken quickly by one person faced with flimsy evidence and motivated by personal dislike, without much regard to the impact on me or to the company in the long term. My line manager had suspended someone in the past – he realised it was a fairly straightforward way to end someone’s career – and therefore it is essential that it becomes less easy to do.
Finally, it would be good if ACAS had more teeth with regard to higher paid employees (over £75k per year) because a suspension often results in a loss of reputation and expertise. The company is not held accountable for this. It was a shock to be told by solicitors that the severe negative impact on my health is considered ‘business as usual’ and Personal Injury claims for problems resulting from a suspension are extremely difficult to win.
To anyone who has been suspended, I feel for you and I believe that words cannot express how horrific the impact on you and your families – hopefully in the future it will be possible to prevent this from happening to others in the future.
