A recent ruling by the Sheffield Employment Tribunal (ET) has highlighted potential pitfalls for employers considering whether to make a part-time, job sharing post full-time. It found that Capita Customer Management Services had both unfairly dismissed and indirectly sexually discriminated against Mrs. J. McBride when it tried to change her job.
The background
Mrs. McBride had been on a permanent contract since her initial employment in 1999 with a company called Ventura, from which she transferred to Capita. She took maternity leave in April 2015 and returned to work two years later as an implementation manager within a partnership deal on which she had worked before, but on 28 September that year she submitted a statutory flexible working request as two of her children had health issues.
Her line manager, Mr. Lovell, informed her that her request had been refused but that there was a possible job share available, on another project and with another worker returning from maternity leave. She accepted that role and her transfer to a permanent part-time contract was confirmed by Lovell on 2 November.
In her testimony to the ET Mrs. McBride complained that within weeks Lovell had started to give her and her co-worker individual responsibility for separate projects, which effectively rendered one shared job into two part-time ones. Mr. Lovell defended his decisions as being in the interests of Capita Group during a ‘highly turbulent time’ in which a major turnaround of the business was being attempted. As the restructuring of the business progressed Mr. Lovell felt, he claimed, that all of the roles within his team should be full-time and that none was suitable as a job share. Mrs. McBride was informed on 30 April 2018 that her team was changing and that all roles would be full-time. She was invited to a consultation meeting at which she expressed an opinion that job sharing was perfectly possible if workload was reorganized, and that it had simply not been given a fair chance to work.
Having attended redundancy meetings at which she was offered alternative roles but rejected them as they were all full-time, on 15 June Mrs. McBride received a notice of redundancy. She appealed but the decision was upheld and, having served out her notice, she left the company on 6 September.
Her claim for unfair dismissal and sexual discrimination was brought to the ET on 28 November. The ET ruled in Mrs. McBride’s favour because Capita had failed to provide Mrs. McBride with any compelling evidence that making the role full-time would make meaningful improvements to it. The judge felt that a reasonable approach would have been to test the possibilities far more rigorously before coming to a decision, and that in this case the employer simply had insufficient hard evidence, as opposed to impression and opinion, on which to base the decision.
What does this ruling mean for other employers?
Clearly an employee cannot just be informed that their job sharing arrangements is no longer in a business’s interest unless that business can justify the decision. An employer may come to that conclusion, of course, but they must be able to provide evidence in support. Capita is considering whether or not to appeal.
