posted 13th October 2026
Nobody budgets for a grievance.
It arrives out of the blue, pulls in a senior manager, HR and a solicitor, and runs for three months or more. When it ends, the cost never appears on a single line, so the lesson never really gets learnt.
That is why coaching is one of the first things cut when money is tight because it's visible in the budget, whereas investigation costs are not.
This post puts a figure on it, using the best UK evidence available, and then sets that figure against what early support for a manager actually costs.
£28.5 billion a year, and litigation is not the biggest part
The most thorough attempt to cost workplace conflict in the UK was carried out by Richard Saundry and Peter Unwin for Acas in 2021. Their estimate is that conflict costs UK employers £28.5 billion every year, covering informal, formal and legal processes plus sickness absence and resignations.
The detail is more useful than the headline. Most organisations run formal procedures because they are worried about litigation. Yet litigation accounts for a small fraction of the total. Dismissals and the productivity lost through resignations account for 79 per cent of the £28.5 billion.
| Where the cost sits | £ billion |
| Informal resolution, including mediation | 0.25 |
| Formal process: grievances and discipline, including dismissals | 12.8 |
| Litigation: management time, legal costs and compensation | 0.77 |
| Resignation, sickness absence and presenteeism | 14.7 |
| Total | 28.52 |
Source: Saundry and Unwin (2021), reproduced in Under Investigation (2025), Table 4.1.
The thing employers fear most, the tribunal, is the smallest line. The things that quietly drain a business, people leaving, people off sick, people at their desk but not really working, are the biggest.
What one investigation costs
National figures are hard to feel. Per-person figures are not.
Saundry and Unwin put the annual cost of an employee involved in formal proceedings at £6,405. The equivalent for an employee whose issue was handled informally, with no further action, was £1,941.
Their alternative calculation, which follows a single case through to its end, is starker:
| How the conflict plays out | Total cost |
| Early informal resolution: management time and possibly mediation | £1,918 |
| Effective use of formal procedure, including sickness absence | £8,775 |
| Employee never raises it, presenteeism, then leaves and is replaced | £31,103 |
| Formal process handled badly: sickness absence, then the person leaves and is replaced | £44,961 |
Source: Saundry and Unwin (2021), cited in Under Investigation (2025), Chapter 4.
Other UK studies land in the same territory. East Lancashire Primary Care Trust costed each formal grievance case at £14,966. Aneurin Bevan University Health Board calculated that every formal investigation it averted saved £21,090. Hoel and colleagues put a full formal investigation at £42,067 at 2024 prices.
The figures vary because the methods and the sectors vary. The direction does not. A formal investigation costs somewhere between £9,000 and £45,000, and the informal route costs under £2,000.
The authors of Under Investigation make the point plainly: informal resolution may be 113 times less expensive than formal process.
The costs that never reach a spreadsheet
Everything above is the accountant's view. It misses two things.
First, the people. Chapter 1 of Under Investigation, written by consultant clinical psychologist Benna Waites, maps the impact of being investigated across seven areas of life: professional, reputational, financial, health, emotional, social and family. At the mild end that means job insecurity, anxiety and strain on finances. At the severe end it includes major illness, ostracisation and, in a small number of documented cases, death by suicide.
Two of the case studies in the book had barely any sickness absence before their investigations began. Both were signed off. Both stopped sleeping.
And it does not stop with the person under investigation. The colleague who raised the concern carries their own version of it. The team around them senses something is wrong and rumours spread.
Second, the opportunity cost. Every hour a senior manager spends on an investigation is an hour not spent on the work they were hired to do. Every recruit who joins a team mid-investigation reads the atmosphere and quietly updates their view of the company. None of that appears in the £28.5 billion. All of it is real.
Prevention pays: two NHS examples
This is not theory. Two UK health organisations have measured what happens when you make formal investigation the last resort rather than the first.
Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust identified a culture of blame, excessive suspensions and too many disciplinary cases. It switched to early intervention with a restorative approach. Between April 2014 and March 2018 disciplinary actions and suspensions fell from 66 to 37. Sickness absence dropped by 0.5 per cent at a time when it had been rising. Legal costs fell by £270,000. Overall, the Trust saved £4 million a year in staff costs, of which roughly £2.5 million was attributed to the change in culture.
Aneurin Bevan University Health Board made formal investigations a last resort and saved more than £700,000 in a single year.
Two things stand out. Both organisations acted before conflict reached formal procedures, which Saundry and Unwin identified as the critical point to intervene. And both put a number on it, which is why the change stuck.
Where coaching fits
Most grievances do not start as grievances. They start as a manager who avoided a conversation for weeks. A team lead promoted for being good at the job and given no support to be good at managing people. A deadline agreed under pressure that everyone knew was impossible.
That is the point at which a short, practical coaching conversation changes the outcome. And it doesn’t always have to be a six-month programme. Sometimes thirty minutes before the difficult meeting and thirty minutes after it is all it needs.
In The Strength Report 2025 we set the cost of coaching against the cost of a single unresolved issue escalating to formal action:
| The cost of not coaching | |
| Grievance investigation (6 to 12 weeks) | £22,000+ |
| Suspension and overtime cover | £4,500 |
| Manager time diverted from core work | £2,000+ |
| Potential legal cost | £5,000+ |
| Recruitment and onboarding of replacements | £6,000 to £12,000 per role |
| Productivity and morale | Hard to quantify, significant |
| Reputation | Damaged client and stakeholder trust |
| Six 90-minute sessions over six months, higher-end programme | £4,500 to £6,000 |
The £22,000 figure sits comfortably inside the range the academic studies produce. If anything, it is conservative.
Framed this way, a full coaching programme costs less than one grievance. And it does not need to prevent a grievance every time to pay for itself. It needs to prevent one every few years.
The part budget-holders get wrong
When we asked leaders what a reasonable price for six coaching sessions would be, most said £1,500 to £2,100. Just over a quarter said less than £1,500.
The anchor is wrong because the comparison is wrong. People price coaching against training, or against nothing. They should price it against the investigation it replaces and the positive work environment it creates.
One business owner in the survey put it better than we could: "It's only expensive if you don't see the results, and you won't if you don't follow through."
What to do with this
If you hold a people budget, three things are worth doing this quarter.
Pull the last two years of formal cases and cost one of them properly: management hours, HR hours, legal fees, sickness cover, any replacement hire. Most organisations have never done this once.
Look at where those cases started. In our experience the trigger is usually a conversation that did not happen, or happened badly, weeks or months earlier.
Put support in at that point, not after. Coaching for the managers who carry the hardest conversations is cheaper than any of the alternatives, and the evidence above says so.
The Strength Report 2026 is out this autumn, with new data from UK leaders on who has coaching, what they expect to pay for it and what happens when they do not get it. If you want it the day it lands, register your interest with Be Business Fit and we will send it to you first.
Sources
- Cooper, A. and Neal, A. (eds) (2025) Under Investigation: Transforming Disciplinary Practice in the Workplace. Bristol University Press. Chapter 1 (Waites) and Chapter 4.
- Saundry, R. and Unwin, P. (2021) Estimating the costs of workplace conflict. Acas.
- Kaur et al (2019), Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust, cited in Cooper and Neal (2025).
- Cooper et al (2024b), Aneurin Bevan University Health Board, cited in Cooper and Neal (2025).
- Be Business Fit (2025) The Strength Report 2025, ROI panel, p.23.
