Author: Mr Adrian Ramdat (Director of Training & Consultancy)
July 2026
Having led whistleblowing arrangements for a large organisation, one of the most difficult practical challenges I encountered wasn't understanding the law; it was deciding, in the moment, whether a concern in front of me was a grievance or a protected disclosure.
On paper the distinction looks straightforward. A grievance concerns an individual's own employment: bullying, discrimination, pay, working conditions, a disagreement with a manager. A protected disclosure is different in kind: it's information a worker reasonably believes is in the public interest and tends to show one of the categories of wrongdoing set out in the Employment Rights Act 1996. The legal distinction matters, and organisations need to get it right. In practice, though, I rarely found it as clean as the legislation suggests.
Where the Lines Blur
Concerns have a habit of refusing to sit in one box. An employee raises what looks like a straightforward grievance about bullying by their line manager; as the investigation opens up, evidence surfaces that the manager had also been ignoring legal obligations, manipulating records, or sidestepping regulatory requirements. A personal employment issue turns into something with much wider organisational consequences. The reverse happens just as often: concerns come in through the whistleblowing channel that, once investigated, turn out to be personal workplace disputes with no public interest element at all.
Neither is unusual, and both point to the same weakness in how most organisations manage concerns: they try to classify something before they've investigated it. The first discussion is usually whether it's a grievance or whistleblowing, because that label decides which policy applies and who owns the case. But that's the wrong order. The question that actually matters isn't "is this a grievance or a protected disclosure"; it's "what are the facts." The true nature of a concern is very often something you can only see with hindsight, once the evidence is in front of you.
A Two-Tier System
Part of what makes this hard is structural. Grievances typically sit with HR; protected disclosures tend to go to compliance, legal, internal audit, or specialist investigators. There's nothing wrong with that division on its own, since each brings genuinely different expertise. The problem starts when the investigation gets shaped by which door the concern walked through, rather than by what actually happened. I've seen near-identical concerns handled in completely different ways purely because one employee called theirs a grievance and another called theirs whistleblowing: ownership becomes the focus instead of the facts, or two separate investigations run in parallel over different aspects of the same concern, producing duplication, inconsistent findings, and delay that serves nobody.
The Boundary Keeps Shifting
Employment law isn't making this easier. The scope of whistleblowing protection continues to evolve: for example, disclosures about an employer's failure to comply with its legal duty to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment may now attract whistleblowing protection, where the statutory requirements are met. So a sexual harassment grievance can also raise whistleblowing considerations, depending on what the disclosure actually reveals. It's one more reason early classification is the wrong instinct: the facts decide what a concern is, not the label an employee happened to reach for when they raised it.
Evidence First, Label Second
None of this means the legal distinction should disappear. Organisations still need to recognise the different frameworks and give whistleblowers the protections the law affords them. What I'd personally change is the order of operations: instead of forcing a concern into a procedural box on day one, treat the first stage as a common, objective fact-finding exercise. Establish what happened, and let the classification (grievance, protected disclosure, sometimes both) follow from what the evidence actually shows. Only then should the relevant legal framework and procedure apply.
Employees certainly shouldn't be expected to understand employment law before they raise a concern; their job is to report honestly what they know. The organisation's job is to investigate objectively and establish which framework fits. In my experience, the strongest investigations are the ones that stay open-minded until the evidence is actually in. The law requires organisations to tell the two apart but it doesn't require them to decide which is which before they've done the initial work of finding out.
Building Confidence in Managing Workplace Concerns
Successfully managing grievances and protected disclosures takes more than a well-written policy. It takes people who understand the legal framework, can assess a concern objectively, and have the confidence to run a fair, proportionate, evidence-led investigation. At The Signature Brand, we provide:
• Accredited Whistleblowing Management Training for those responsible for receiving, assessing and managing protected disclosures.
• Workplace Investigations Training, equipping HR professionals, managers and investigators with the practical skills to investigate workplace concerns fairly and objectively.
• Bite-sized Whistleblowing Events, with regular updates on legislation, case law and emerging best practice.
If your organisation is reviewing how, it manages grievances and protected disclosures or looking to strengthen your policies and processes, we'd be pleased to talk about how we can help.
Photo by Susan Q Yin on Unsplash