In a Pub News

I have been called many things in my time but most often, after answering the question ‘what do you do?’ I am told I am unusual.
I take this as a compliment because I enjoy being different. I have run pubs for over 16 years. During this time I also studied and qualified as a solicitor.
I am currently a tenant of tied public house and a managing director of a specialist employment law firm, Insight Legal. Although the two jobs seem miles apart, they compliment each other well.
Through my blogs I hope to give you insight into the kind of issues I have faced as a publican and how I have dealt with them.
With my lawyer head on, they are not designed to be advise as to how you should handle similar cases as each case is unique but I hope they will make you feel that as an employer you do have some powers and control.
There is a solution for every HR problem but what that is will depend on your own business needs.


Theft and till discrepancies

A few years ago now, I was managing a pub for a big chain. I had employed a female member of staff who proved to be very good at the job. So much so, against my initial instincts, I employed her younger brother.
The early weeks were fine and I felt vindicated in my choice of new recruit. However, over time I stared to notice till shortages. Luckily, I already had in place my own system for monitoring tills and beer wastage – a weekly staff information sheet that showed them our take, the wet and dry split, how much they personally took and the tills variances. It also included the yields on the beer, as monitored by our dispense system.

With this system I found staff were always interested in the business, their performance and accuracy. It helped them feel involved and improved their performance but it also enabled me to identify problems including a pattern of till shortages when the brother and sister were on shift together.

I also identified, through line checking, a pattern of bottles going missing following their combined shifts. I was so disappointed and hurt to think staff could steal from me but knew this was par for the course when running a pub.

I suspended them both (there was a clause in their contract allowing me to do this) whilst I went back over my stocks checks, till checks, reviewed CCTV.

I spoke to them both individually about how they accounted for stock an their use of the till. I presented them with the audit trail but both denied any knowledge of the discrepancies and put it down to simple mistakes by the other.

I found myself in a position where I had no way of proving whether someone was really stealing from me or if they were making genuine mistakes and no way to distinguish whether it was one person (if so which one) or if both of them were guilty of the conduct.

Thankfully as an employer I do not need to be convinced beyond reasonable doubt that they are guilty of theft to take disciplinary action. This is the criminal standard of proof and doesn’t apply in disciplinary situations.

There was enough of a pattern for me to consider disciplinary action so I invited them both to a disciplinary hearing. Usually employees can be accompanied, at a disciplinary hearing, by a colleague. I did not allow the brother to be accompanied by the sister (and vice versa) as this would not have given me the opportunity to question them independently.

As an employer I needed to show that I had reasonable grounds for believing they were guilty of conduct complained of, which I stated as either negligence in accounting for stock/cash or theft. I didn’t need to prove one or the other’s guilt provided I treated both of them the same.

Before I communicated the outcome of the hearing to both the employees they both resigned and I never heard from them again.

I have often found since, that where you suspect an employee is not following procedure or not meeting your standards the more you show you are monitoring these procedures across the board (not just with them) the dishonest or, dare I say it, lazy employees will usually move on to somewhere else where they are not monitored as much.

Mel Parsons is the licensee of The Tap & Barrel in Plymouth