Dear all,

We have a complicated situation and I wanted to bounce off you all your thoughts.

We took on an employee as a buyer in July of this year. Initially there were no problems. In early September they approached their Branch Manager to say that they were finding the job complicated and asked if there was any other job they could do, which there was not.

They also made comment to a number of other employees suggesting they were finding the work complicated.

Run forwards a week or two and I recived a call from the same person suggesting a number of issues from a batch changing without the person having done anything, otheres having their password, paperwork being missing, and feeling concerned about comments about being googled and sometimes people are followed home.

I spoke to the person suggesting they start keeping a diary, if someone said something that she was not happy with to ask in an inocent way what did they mean and with regards to doing anything we would look into the batch, but if they wanted us to investigate others we would need some more detail in writing.

We got the employee to talk with their branch manager, who repeated the same suggestions. The employee then appeared to start back tracking and said they had not made any allegations and all they wanted was for it to go away but they were scared of people in the branch.

The person has now left a message saying they are on the verge of a breakdown and have been seen by a crisis team (a psychiatric team who help people as the last step to being sectioned) They are saying that they are suffering from stress (no comments on the cause)

The concerns are
1) The comments made by the employee, who says they are scared but has not given enough information for things to be investigated
2) Going off with stress – the person is only in their probationary period and how we should handle (for the first two weeks we will pay at full pay, even though this is over and above sick pay for someone with such a short lenght of service.
3) There are concerns with regard to the job performance and comments about the complexity of it
4) Concern that to question the probationary period could be linked to the grievance, even though not raised in line with the proceedure.

I have deliberatley not written the approach I want to recommend to not influence anything you might suggest.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Duncan Chandler