Usually not, and the Code is the reason rather than the obstacle. The Acas Code of Practice on disciplinary and grievance procedures sets the floor a tribunal measures a formal process against. It does not say that formal is where a problem starts. Its foreword: "A quiet word is often all that is required to resolve an issue." The draft replacement, out for consultation until 23 September 2026, is blunter — "Concerns about misconduct or unsatisfactory performance are usually best dealt with informally." The Code's teeth are somewhere else entirely: a tribunal can adjust an award by up to 25 per cent where an employer unreasonably failed to follow it. So the question being answered at seven in the morning is narrower than it feels. Not is there a process, but has the earlier one been tried, and is this serious enough to skip it.
For what the Code entitles anyone to, acas.org.uk is the source and nothing on this page substitutes for it. What follows is the other half: what running it looks like from behind the till.
The Code is shorter than the folklore
It is issued under section 199 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992. The version in force was issued on 11 March 2015. It is not itself the law — a tribunal takes it into account and can adjust an award by up to 25 per cent for unreasonable failure to comply with any provision of it. Acas publishes a separate, longer, non-statutory guide alongside it, and the two get conflated constantly. The Code is the floor. The guide is the detail. Company policy usually goes further than either, and in day-to-day practice it is the document a manager is measured against — which is not the same as it displacing the Code. Where a policy and the Code appear to pull in different directions, that is a question for HR or Acas, not for a chapter like this one.
It does not cover everything a store deals with. The Code states it "does not apply to dismissals due to redundancy or the non-renewal of fixed-term contracts on their expiry."
Right now there are two documents in play. Acas opened a consultation on a redrafted Code on 30 July 2026, closing at 11.59pm on 23 September 2026. The redraft reorganises the material around resolution rather than procedure: separate sections for resolving employer concerns informally and worker concerns informally, before the formal chapters, plus new sections on avoiding unlawful discrimination and on mediation. The 2015 Code remains the one in force until a new one is approved. Anything below that quotes the draft is flagged as draft.
The economics Acas published with the consultation are the argument in one line. Formal disciplinary cases are estimated to cost UK employers around £2 billion a year, formal grievances a further £356 million, against roughly £250 million for informal resolution. Roughly a tenth. Every manager who has run both already knew the ratio; it is useful to have it costed.
The conversation before stage one
This is the part nobody publishes, because it is the part that leaves no artefact.
The draft Code describes it plainly at paragraph 17: "The employer should speak with the worker to explain the nature of their concern. They should listen to what the worker has to say and discuss what is needed to resolve it." Three moves. Say the thing, hear the answer, agree what changes.
What the Code cannot specify is where and when, and on a shop floor that is most of the job. The same sentence delivered on the aisle within earshot of two colleagues and a customer is a different sentence to the one delivered in the office with the door shut. The first is a telling-off with witnesses. The second is a conversation. Nothing in the Code distinguishes them, and everything about whether the behaviour changes does.
Mine happened in private, and the more serious it was the less negotiable that got. The opener was deliberately ordinary — a friendly conversation in an informal sense, because that is what it was. Something like: let's discuss last week's waste routines and the results.
Then the sentence I had to learn to say properly. What comes out first is "you've failed". What should come out is: your department is not on track in the right direction, and we need to improve it. I have caught myself mid-sentence making that swap, and the swap is the whole technique. The failure belongs to the department. The person owns the department. Those are not the same sentence, and the second one leaves them somewhere to stand.
Then I stop talking and ask three things, in order:
- Can you tell me what the issues were?
- How are you planning to improve it?
- By when can we expect to see some results?
The diagnosis, the plan and the date all come from them, not from me. If I supply any of the three, I have taken the problem off them and made it mine — and I will be back having the same conversation in a fortnight, because nothing was actually transferred.
The routine is what makes it happen at all. Waste results came round every week whether anyone wanted them to or not, so the conversation had a scheduled reason to exist. Without that, the awkward version gets postponed until it is no longer informal.
The draft is explicit on one point, at paragraph 19 — and it is worth reading as a proposal rather than a rule, because the consultation does not close until 23 September 2026. If, during an informal conversation, it becomes appropriate to start a formal disciplinary procedure, "the informal conversation or meeting should be ended." That sentence exists because of a specific failure: the chat that gets worse, keeps going, and becomes an unplanned disciplinary hearing with no notice, no allegation in writing and no companion. Everything said in it is then sitting inside a process it was never part of. Ending a conversation mid-flow is uncomfortable, which is presumably why the draft says it out loud.
What gets written down, and when
The reflex is to record nothing, on the grounds that recording it makes it formal. The draft Code takes the opposite position and then guards it. Paragraph 21: "While it may be useful for the employer to confirm in writing what has been discussed, employers should ensure this is not later treated as a formal warning." And, in the same paragraph: "An informal conversation should never by itself result in a formal disciplinary warning or other formal disciplinary action."
Both halves matter, and they fail in opposite directions.
Write nothing, and six months later there is no evidence the conversation ever happened. The pattern appears to a tribunal, and to the employee, to have started at stage one — which makes stage one look like an overreaction to a first offence rather than the third step in a sequence. The manager is arguing from memory against a written record that does not exist.
Write it as a warning, and the informal route has been spent without any of the protections that make a formal route fair. No allegation in writing, no time to prepare, no companion. That contaminates whatever comes next.
The distinction that holds is between a note and an outcome. A file note records that a conversation took place, when, what was raised and what was agreed. It is not a sanction and it does not appear on a disciplinary record. A warning is an outcome of a formal procedure, and it can only be reached through one.
Where I ended up differs from the standard advice, which is always some version of "keep a file note". A file note is one artefact and it only exists if you remembered to write it. The trail I actually relied on was mostly indirect, and most of it already existed:
- Team meetings where colleagues sign to acknowledge they attended. That sheet establishes what was communicated, to whom, on what date — without a single one-to-one taking place.
- Training documents, which show what support was given rather than what was demanded.
- Email chains, which date themselves.
None of that was created as evidence. It was created because it is how the operation runs, and it turns out to be the record when someone later asks what help and support had been given. Performance management does not have to happen on a one-to-one basis, and the trail does not have to be built out of disciplinary paperwork.
The reason I work this way is not the tribunal. It is memory. You forget a conversation you had. You forget an instruction you gave — and then you are annoyed that it was not followed, when the honest answer is that neither of you could say for certain what was asked. Having it down in black and white settles that before it becomes a dispute about character. It has saved me, and it is now just how I work, largely without thinking about it.
Informal, or formal?
The call
Informal where it is a first occurrence, isolated, and fixable in a conversation. Formal where a pattern is established and the informal route has already been used, or where the conduct is serious enough that the Code points straight at the formal procedure.
Rejected
What it costs
The informal route is slower to an outcome and deniable. Without a note it can look, months later, like nothing was ever raised — and the manager carries that gap, not the employee.
Revisit when
The second time the same conversation happens about the same thing. Also when the redrafted Code is finalised: the consultation closes 23 September 2026, and the informal sections are the ones being rewritten.
The call I got wrong was not about the colleague
The one I still think about was not a mishandled conversation with an employee. It was overriding my own management team.
They had made a judgement about a colleague's performance. I disagreed and I overrode it, and the reason I gave myself was that they were too inexperienced to be making that call. I was wrong — about the decision, and about them.
What I landed on afterwards is that the decision belonged to the manager who owned that department. My job was to weigh in, not to overrule, and there are only two things that change that: it is genuinely business-critical, or the proposed handling does not sit within the Code. Outside those two, reaching down is not leadership, it is just seniority.
The cost did not land on the colleague. It landed on my managers. Override someone's judgement once and the message they take is that you do not trust it — and after that they bring you decisions instead of making them, which is slower and worse and entirely self-inflicted.
The repair was the ordinary one. I apologised, told them I should have left it with them, and said plainly that their judgement had been correct. Open, transparent, humble. There is no procedural fix for this in the Code, but the Code is what told me where my authority actually stopped.
What it costs when a stage is skipped
The formal sequence in the 2015 Code is short. Establish the facts, without unreasonable delay, and where practicable have different people carry out the investigation and the hearing. Inform the employee of the problem in writing, with "sufficient information about the alleged misconduct or poor performance and its possible consequences." Hold a meeting "without unreasonable delay whilst allowing the employee reasonable time to prepare their case." Allow the statutory right to be accompanied. Decide. Allow an appeal, heard by someone not previously involved.
Read as a list it looks like admin. Read as a sequence it is load-bearing, because each step is the evidence for the next. The facts are what the letter can allege. The letter is what the employee can prepare against. The preparation is what makes the meeting a hearing rather than an ambush. Remove any one and the ones after it are standing on nothing.
Skipping is almost never a decision. It is a rota. "Different people carry out the investigation and the hearing" is an administrative sentence in a store with a management team of four and a stretch in it. So is an appeal heard by someone not previously involved, when the only person senior enough is the one who signed the outcome. The Code says "where practicable" for exactly this reason, and the honest version of the constraint is worth stating out loud rather than pretending the separation happened.
Each skipped stage has a specific downstream cost, and they are not interchangeable.
A thin investigation moves the fact-finding into the hearing. The employee's account then arrives after the decision has been half-formed, and the meeting turns into the manager defending a position instead of testing one.
A thin notice letter — "conduct" and a date — leaves nothing to prepare against. The companion has nothing to work with, and the meeting drifts into a fishing expedition across every grievance anyone has ever had.
An appeal heard by the person who made the decision closes the process on paper and leaves it open on the floor. Everyone on that rota knows who heard it.
And the cost that never appears in the file: the rest of the team watched the whole thing. They did not see the paperwork. They saw who was taken off the floor, how long they were gone, and what changed afterwards.
What this reads like from the outside
An owner reading a manager's handling of one of these is not checking whether the Code was recited. They are checking whether the manager could say, afterwards and without notes, why this went informal and that one did not, and what evidence sat behind the choice.
The Code is a floor, not a script. It sets out what fairness looks like once a matter is formal and leaves almost everything about the stage before it to judgement: whether a conversation is a first occurrence or the third variation of the same one, whether the office is free, whether it is worth interrupting a Saturday to do it properly rather than doing it badly on Monday. That judgement is the part that does not transfer from a policy document, and it is the part that shows.
Anything in here that turns on entitlement — what the Code requires, what a worker is entitled to, what a tribunal would make of it — belongs to acas.org.uk, and the draft under consultation is published there too. This is one manager's account of applying it, not a statement of anyone's rights.