Quick Hits
- AI-generated employee complaints can be lengthy and persuasive but may obscure the key facts and issues.
- Employers could consider word limits for internal complaints while allowing exceptions and supporting evidence.
- Focusing on main issues, allowing reasonable response times, and using AI carefully will help employers manage lengthy employee complaint submissions.
AI can make a complaint long, fluent, and superficially persuasive while obscuring relevant facts. It can be very difficult to see the wood for the trees and a feeling of not understanding what a complaint may be about, despite having read twenty pages, is not uncommon. In the United Kingdom, AI often advises employees to throw in a Data Subject Access Request (DSAR) as well for good measure.
AI has a natural bias towards the user and is only fed the user’s side of a dispute. The resulting employee-favourable output gives false encouragement to employees who feel emboldened and confident to pursue their complaint as far as possible, with their AI free solicitor at their side for the journey.
So how do employers respond? It is time to consider whether employers should be amending policies to impose a word limit. Word limits are an accepted measure in courts and tribunals to ensure the time and resources spent dealing with a case is proportionate. Surely that same principle should apply to internal processes, although there do not yet appear to be any court decisions on this in the UK.
There should however be some safeguards to ensure employees are able to properly convey detail where appropriate. One thought would be to limit the length of the complaint, but not any accompanying evidence or chronology.
Opponents may cite a word limit as an unreasonable barrier to justice, but all disputes can be sufficiently summarised within 2,000 words, at least at a high level. This would help justice to be served as it would enable the employer to understand the big picture and main issue(s) without getting bogged down. It would also allow an employer to respond more swiftly as delays caused by the need to understand twenty pages of detail do not serve justice. Employers may want to seek further detail in appropriate cases and that obligation could be set out in the applicable company policy.
Policies could also stipulate that employees can request an extension to the word limit in appropriate cases such as when relying on disability-related reasonable adjustments, or where English is not the employee’s first language.
The approach is legally untested in the UK but it is time to start the conversation. In the meantime, some tips for dealing with lengthy complaints:
- Consider focusing on the key issues (assuming they can be worked out!).
- AI can be responsibly used to summarise the complaint.
- It is acceptable to inform an employee who has submitted a lengthy complaint that more time will be needed to handle it than the time period specified in the applicable policy, whether or not the policy time period is expressed as merely a target with provision to disapply. The legal standard is that responses should be sent “within a reasonable period” and this can be weeks or months in appropriate cases.
- Finally, slowing down the pace of communications may be helpful. AI enables employees to respond to the latest email within minutes—perhaps with another lengthy document. Where applicable consider just acknowledging receipt and then taking a week or longer to send a substantive response.
Ogletree Deakins’ Artificial Intelligence and Innovation Practice Group and London office will continue to monitor developments and will post updates on the Artificial Intelligence and Innovation and United Kingdom blogs as additional information becomes available.
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