SE

The Grievance Trap: why a reliance on HR kills psychological safety

Karin Tenelius
7 October 2025

A hammer labelled 'Escalate' and a box of nails labelled 'Conflicts'

HR case loads are through the roof. Managers are terrified of saying the wrong thing. The climate in many organisations is extremely cautious, like everyone is walking on eggshells – as if a bomb could go off at any moment.

This is what we are hearing from our clients and also experiencing when we lead training inside companies. In addition to training hundreds of managers every year, we at Tuff have also spent the last two decades coaching teams to shift conflicts. I want to share my, and our, perspective on this issue to support the many HR professionals we collaborate with and who follow us.

The problem as we see it

These organisational grievance processes are designed to protect employees from discrimination and harassment. Clearly, they serve an important function.

But here is where the current system is breaking down:

  • Overuse – employees are triggering the process for small grievances or misunderstandings that don’t need to be escalated

  • HR case overload – especially in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs), HR functions are being overloaded with cases, drawn into solving interpersonal issues, which impacts their other responsibilities and further leads them to treat these issues as ‘tasks to be managed’

  • Mental health crisis – in many cases, defendants and/or complainants are being signed off work with mental health issues as a result of the immense stress of participating in these processes, which become like mini court trials

  • General climate of fear – all of this contributes to a climate of fear and cautiousness, with everyone terrified to say the wrong thing or offend someone

  • The hammer-nail dilemma – every conflict is viewed and evaluated for priority through the lens of a legal challenge, rather than an interpersonal or collaboration fallout

The irony is, these same organisations are espousing the importance of psychological safety. Psychological safety is the belief that it is safe to take interpersonal risks in groups. How can anyone feel safe with the threat that they might be silently accused at any moment hanging over them?

We think there are two main contributing factors to this current situation.

How we relate to conflicts and our capacity to resolve them
Conflict is an inevitable – and we would argue essential – part of human collaboration. However, we are not taught how to navigate conflicts. Not in our families, schools or workplaces. It’s not surprising, then, that most organisations are full of people completely incapable of knowing what to do when conflicts arise. We also have all sorts of unhelpful ways of relating to conflict.

One of the things we have learned from years of supporting people to transform conflicts is that conflicts are nonlinear. They can rarely be boxed into a structure, like HR grievance processes tend to do.

We also tend to get caught up in “the facts.” Trying to determine an objective version of “the truth” in order to judge who was right and who was wrong.

Our experience is that conflicts NEVER concern factual issues and it’s impossible to resolve a conflict by approaching them from this angle. Most conflicts have to do with things “under the surface” – needs, values, fears, interpretations, interpersonal dynamics, ways of relating, mindsets.

Managers’ ability to deal with conflicts

We also see that 99% of managers lack the confidence, competence, or willingness to engage with conflicts. This is a huge problem. Many conflicts could be nipped in the bud if this were different.

Supporting individuals or groups to navigate conflicts is, in our view, an essential leadership skill. But most leaders aren’t equipped to do this, and many don’t see it (or want to see it) as part of their role.

So what is the alternative?

Since most of the research shows the source of more than half of employee grievances is the relationship with their manager, we believe it starts with leadership:

  1. State expectations when recruiting/promoting people into leadership positions – be clear that part of any manager’s role is being able to foster healthy relationships and deal with conflicts

  2. Equip managers – give managers opportunities to train and practise communication skills such as:

    • giving feedback

    • repairing broken relationships

    • bringing up interpersonal tensions (without needing to be “right”)

    • listening so that others feel truly heard

    • coaching individuals and teams to transform their own conflicts

What about the role of HR?

We see a great potential for HR functions to move away from being firefighters and cleanup crews, and instead be catalysts in a culture shift towards creating a climate of psychological safety – not just in words, but for real.

Our experience tells us that for this shift to happen, HR professionals need to:

  1. Upgrade their own communication skills – this is one of the best ways to break the dependency dynamic. To learn how to be more assertive when it comes to standing for your expertise, and sometimes to practise being more coaching in order to…

  2. Empower rather than enable – if we can equip managers (and employees) with conflict resolution skills, then in situations that tend to escalate to a formal HR process, you can first see if it’s possible to coach them to resolve it themselves, or with the support of a mediator.
    This can also help to bypass the drama triangle, where the complainant gets cast in the “victim” role, the defendant as the “persecutor”, and HR as the “rescuer.” Something which doesn’t empower anyone.

So in conclusion, we see that there is a potential to have organisations with much higher levels of psychological safety, where people aren’t terrified of saying the “wrong” thing and being punished, but rather they feel able to bring up interpersonal tensions and are clear on what support systems to draw on if they feel out of their depth. So much more growth and development (as well as inclusion) is possible in dialogue, rather than in punitive systems.

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To learn more about how to create HR functions that support and empower people in organisations, check out our Tuff Training for HR.

Interested in how can we better equip managers and employees to deal with conflicts and upgrade their relationships? Check out our leadership training.

We also support teams to shift their working climates from toxic or cautious, to generative and psychologically safe. Learn more about our Collaboration Coaching service.

Or get in touch to explore how Tuff could support you in creating a culture of accountability and development.