Employee Relations
Employee relations case management that holds up when it matters
Employee relations software exists for the cases that end up in front of a lawyer, a regulator or a lawsuit. Where those cases cross borders, see global HR service delivery. Document them properly from first contact instead of reconstructing the file afterwards.
#1
Five consecutive years, enterprise HR service delivery
Sapient Insights 2025-2026 HR Systems Survey, 28th edition. 10,000+ HR professionals across 4,670 organizations. See the rankings
8 months
Payback period, fastest in the category
G2, reported April 2025. Against an industry average of 14 months. See the announcement
6 of 6
First places in the enterprise segment
Three HR service delivery categories, each scored separately on user experience and on vendor satisfaction. Enterprise, 5,000 or more employees.
What ER casework needs
Four requirements that are not negotiable
General purpose ticketing tools were built for IT requests. Employee relations casework has different confidentiality, documentation and retention requirements from the first minute.
Restricted visibility
Five independent ways to control who can see a case, applied separately from general HR case management.
Confidential by design
Immutable audit trail
Every action, actor and timestamp recorded. Hiding a note changes its visibility, not its presence in the record.
Defensible
Structured documentation
Consistent capture across grievance, disciplinary, investigation, accommodation and harassment matters.
Consistent
Outcome reporting
Case types, cycle time and outcomes, so patterns surface before they become organizational problems.
Patterns, not anecdotes
Who can see it
Five ways to restrict a case, and they apply to reports too
Most systems offer one permission model. Employee relations needs several, because the reason for restricting a harassment case is not the reason for restricting a case about a member of the executive team. These work independently and can be combined.
By sensitive case flag
Flag a case as sensitive and it disappears from everyone whose role does not carry permission to view sensitive cases. Built for the allegation against a senior leader, and for HR cases about HR.
Set by hand or by rule
By employee filter
Restriction based on attributes in your employee feed, so cases about executives and VIPs never reach a junior team, wherever the case is routed.
Driven by your HCM data
By case label
The label itself carries the restriction. Apply it and anyone without permission for that label loses the case, which is the fastest way to lock down a new category of matter.
Manual or automated
By organization
Segregate casework across legal entities or business units, with an explicit override permission for the people who need to work across them.
Company structure
By department or queue
Restriction that changes as the case moves, based on who currently owns it, so visibility narrows and widens through the lifecycle.
Follows the case
Reports respect all of it
Notifications and reporting honor the same restrictions. A case someone cannot open is not a case they can find in a report or a scheduled export.
Not a screen level trick
The record
Everyone involved, recorded as part of the case
A grievance is rarely one person. The employee raising the concern, the person it concerns, the witnesses and the manager who first heard about it all belong on the record, and reconstructing who knew what afterwards is exactly what goes wrong in email.
Involved parties. Add each person to the case as a party in their own right, so the witness who described the incident is attached to the matter rather than mentioned inside a note.
Child cases. Where a single incident produces separate matters for separate people, each one gets its own case with its own restrictions and its own audit trail, without losing the link to the original.
Structured fields, not free text. Custom fields attach to the case type, so a grievance captures the same information every time, in fields you can actually report on. Text, dates, lists, numbers and yes or no, with any of them made mandatory. That consistency is what makes pattern reporting possible later.
Deadlines
When the clock is contractual, not aspirational
A grievance procedure in a collective agreement does not care that your office was closed. Neither does a statutory deadline. The service level model is built for that.
Stages, as case types. Case types are multi level, so a procedure with a first stage, an appeal and a final stage is modeled as stages rather than as three unrelated cases.
The clock pauses. Case status drives the service level clock. Move a case to awaiting the employee or awaiting a third party and the clock stops, then resumes when the case comes back to you.
Working time is defined, not assumed. Work calendars set the working week per site and per user. Non working schedules capture public holidays and shutdowns. Both feed the service level calculation, so a five working day deadline means five working days at that location.
Swire Coca-Cola adopted Dovetail employee relations case management in 2022, and uses it to document, track and collaborate on ER matters across its bottling operations.
Scope
Start with employee relations. Grow into HR service delivery.
Employee relations is where the legal and regulatory risk sits, so it is a common place to start. The platform underneath is the same one that runs general HR case management, the employee portal and knowledge management, so extending into the wider service model later is a licensing conversation rather than a second implementation.
It also means ER casework sits behind its own restrictions inside one system, instead of in a separate system that the rest of HR cannot see and nobody can report across.
Swire Coca-Cola adopted Dovetail employee relations case management in 2022 and has documented 2,661 cases since going live. Read what changed.
Common questions
Can we stop a case being deleted while litigation is live?
Yes. Cases and employee records carry a purge status that can be set to forbidden or restricted, which exempts them from a retention purge, with notes recording the reason for the restriction.
How do we keep a case about a senior leader away from the HR team who would normally see it?
Two ways, and they combine. The sensitive case flag removes the case from anyone whose role does not carry permission to view sensitive cases. Employee filter restrictions use attributes from your HCM feed, so cases about executives and VIPs are held away from junior teams regardless of routing.
Does this handle union grievance procedures with contractual deadlines?
Yes, configured to your agreement. Multi level case types model the stages, case status pauses and resumes the service level clock while you wait on the other side, and work calendars and non working schedules mean a deadline expressed in working days is calculated in working days at that location.
What about works councils and non-US requirements?
Multi language support, regional permissions and GDPR tooling are standard, which matters for pan-European and global ER teams. Data residency is your choice of US or European data centers.
Can employees raise a sensitive matter themselves?
Yes, through the employee portal, and it lands as a case with the same restrictions, audit trail and service levels as anything raised by HR.
Do we have to move all of HR to use this for employee relations?
No. Employee relations can be the only thing you run in Dovetail. The rest of the platform is there when you want it, not a prerequisite.
See employee relations casework end to end
A working demo of intake, restriction, investigation documentation and outcome reporting, on your own scenarios.