The video of what appears to be a meeting between employees and Genpact’s employee relations team contains an allegation that deserves to sit at the centre of any serious discussion about workplace grievance mechanisms. A manager had allegedly told his team: go ahead and complain to HR if you want. There are multiple complaints against me and nothing has been done.
Whether the manager actually made that statement remains to be established. But the fact that an employee recounted it during an internal grievance discussion is significant. It suggests that at least some employees had come to believe that complaints against their manager would produce little consequence. That belief, once formed, is itself a problem HR must understand and address, even if an investigation ultimately finds that the complaints were handled appropriately.
Genpact has said an independent internal review is under way and appropriate action will follow. The allegations remain unproven. Yet the episode raises a larger question: what happens when employees believe the mechanism designed to protect them has little influence over the person they are complaining about?
“Go ahead and complain to HR if you want. There are multiple complaints against me and nothing has been done.”
The complaint creates competing obligations
When an employee raises a complaint against a manager, the organisation is immediately caught between two legitimate responsibilities. The first is to the complainant: to acknowledge the allegation, examine it fairly and protect the person who raised it from retaliation. The second is to the accused: to avoid prejudgment, recognise that the account may be incomplete or contested, and conduct a process that would withstand scrutiny if it ended in disciplinary action.
Both obligations are real. They are also in tension. An organisation that prioritises the first at the expense of the second risks sanctioning someone on the basis of allegations that have not been tested. An organisation that prioritises the second without sufficient attention to the first risks leaving complainants exposed to the very authority they have questioned. The tension cannot be resolved by policy design alone. A fair investigation and a credible employee experience are not necessarily the same thing, although both are essential.
“This is something where I stood so low being a girl.”
The clock runs differently
For the organisation, a matter under review is a matter in process. Evidence must be gathered, witnesses interviewed and competing accounts examined. None of this necessarily happens quickly, and much of it cannot be shared with the complainant without compromising confidentiality.
For the employee, the passage of time means something different. Every day without a meaningful update can reinforce the suspicion that nothing is happening. The manager may remain in charge of work allocations, performance assessments and leave approvals. The investigation is running on one clock. The employee is living on another.
In the Genpact case, employees reportedly raised concerns through skip-level discussions and subsequently submitted formal complaints to the employee relations team. An investigation may have been progressing even when employees could not see it. But when the organisation cannot disclose much about an investigation, the way it communicates around the process becomes one of the few signals complainants have.
“The investigation is running on one clock. The employee is living on another.”
When the manager appears beyond complaint
The recording contains an allegation that should concern any organisation with a formal grievance mechanism: a manager reportedly telling employees that earlier complaints against him had produced no result. If accurate, it suggests the manager believed complaints posed little threat to his authority and was willing to communicate that belief to his team.
Employees assess grievance mechanisms not only by reading policies but by observing what happens when someone uses them. The Genpact employees alleged that those who raised concerns were subsequently treated more harshly. That claim requires investigation. But the fear of retaliation can influence behaviour long before any formal finding is reached. A grievance mechanism loses much of its practical value if employees believe that using it could make their working lives more difficult.
“A grievance mechanism loses much of its practical value if employees believe that using it could make their working lives more difficult.”
The photograph nobody asked for
Among the accounts in the recording, one has a particular quality of humiliation. A woman described unexpectedly getting her period at work and taking a photograph of a blood stain on a cafeteria chair. Nobody had asked her to do so, she acknowledged, but she believed she might need documentary evidence if questioned about why she had been delayed. Describing how the experience made her feel, she said: “This is something where I stood so low being a girl.”
The degradation she described was not the physical incident. It was the thought that an ordinary bodily experience might need to be documented and defended before a manager she did not trust. Workplace culture is shaped not only by what managers formally require, but by what employees come to believe they must do to protect themselves.
The recording also contains allegations that the manager expressed a preference against employing women because of menstrual and maternity-related needs. These are serious claims that must be established through investigation. But the woman’s account already illustrates an important question: what makes an employee feel that an ordinary health concern requires extraordinary proof?
“The credibility of a grievance mechanism is not established when the policy is written. It is built, or lost, in what happens after the complaint is filed.”
When personal emergencies become performance questions
Another employee described being informed that her fiancé had been admitted to intensive care. According to her account, despite communicating the emergency to colleagues, the manager asked whether she would be able to attend work the following day. The recording also contains an allegation that the manager subsequently questioned her absence and instructed that a disciplinary email and a termination email be drafted and held ready.
These claims remain unverified. Nevertheless, they raise an important question about the discretion managers exercise when personal emergencies collide with operational demands.
There is a difference between asking how an employee’s responsibilities will be covered and making that employee feel that attending to a medical emergency could jeopardise her employment. The distinction is not always captured in policy. It emerges in the language managers use and the judgement they bring to circumstances that do not fit neatly into a leave-management system.
The social media jury
Once the recording reached social media, the allegations entered a different arena. People outside the organisation could now form judgements based on excerpts from an internal meeting, without access to the full evidence, the accused manager’s response or the organisation’s investigation.
Public scrutiny can serve an important purpose, particularly when employees believe internal channels have failed them. But it also creates a second process, one that operates without the safeguards of a formal investigation. Public opinion moves quickly, while establishing facts takes time.
HR must now investigate the allegations while knowing that its eventual conclusions may be judged against a narrative already circulating outside the organisation. If the findings do not support the allegations, some may question whether the investigation was sufficiently independent. If they do, others may wonder whether external pressure influenced the outcome.
Neither reaction would necessarily be justified. Yet both illustrate the difficulty of maintaining confidence in a process once a workplace dispute becomes public.
The organisation cannot control every interpretation of its eventual decision. What it can defend is the integrity of the investigation: whether the evidence was examined fairly, whether both sides were heard and whether the conclusions followed from the findings rather than from the pressure surrounding them.
The test HR faces
What makes these cases structurally difficult is that HR must administer a process within the same organisation that employs both the complainant and the accused. Unlike a court, where investigation, prosecution, defence and adjudication are institutionally separated, an internal grievance mechanism operates within existing reporting relationships, organisational hierarchies and professional loyalties.
A well-designed process can separate investigation from decision-making and introduce independent oversight. But it cannot entirely remove the organisational context in which the complaint arose.
HR cannot ignore the complaint. That would be an abdication of responsibility. It cannot rush to a finding either, because that risks injustice to the accused. It must establish the facts, protect those involved and ensure that the eventual decision is based on evidence rather than managerial influence or public pressure.
This is not necessarily a process failure waiting to happen. It is an inherently difficult responsibility, one that requires investigative competence, independence and judgement beyond the routine administration of HR policies.
Most large organisations have invested in complaint infrastructure: ethics hotlines, skip-level access, formal procedures and defined escalation routes. These mechanisms are necessary. But their existence is not evidence that employees trust them.
Much of the attention goes into whether a complaint was received, assigned, investigated and closed. Far less goes into what the employee experienced between those stages: whether the complainant received meaningful acknowledgement, whether retaliation concerns were examined, whether the accused’s continued authority over the complainant was addressed, and whether the outcome was communicated as fully as confidentiality and fairness permitted.
The Genpact investigation will eventually reach its conclusions. The organisation will decide what action the findings warrant. A company may have a well-written policy, an independent investigation and a formally correct outcome. Those things matter enormously. But they do not automatically establish that employees will trust the process the next time something goes wrong.
That trust is shaped by what happens between the complaint and the conclusion.
The credibility of a grievance mechanism is not established when the policy is written. It is built, or lost, in what happens after the complaint is filed.