Chamber and committees

As an employer, the Scottish Government is committed to providing a workplace free from discrimination and to ensuring the fair treatment of staff. We are committed to dealing with staff grievances fairly, consistently, quickly through our robust Fairness at Work policy. We also recognise the potential value to all parties of being able to resolve a dispute in an alternative way. Therefore in addition to the informal and formal processes we have introduced the opportunity to resolve issues through mediation.

Through our People Strategy and Fairness at Work policy we set out clearly the culture and behaviours we as an organisation expect to see from our staff and managers. We recognise that, if concerns are not dealt with in a way that is perceived as fair or are left unresolved, the working relationship may deteriorate and impact on all individuals involved. We therefore have various methods in addition to the informal and formal policy through which we encourage people to record and report bullying and harassment, including via our trades unions and staff diversity networks. We capture through our People Survey areas where levels of bullying or harassment are higher and our diversity manager works with these areas to build confidence of both staff and managers to tackle the issues directly.

Our Equality Outcome – Equality And Diversity Matters sets out our ambition to raise the confidence of managers and staff to deal with issues around diversity and equality. As part of our improvement process we will be undertaking analysis to measure over time the level of knowledge about human resources policies and how staff feel about unfair treatment as well as to better understand the issues on which our staff most regularly require information.