We can only speculate what happened behind the closed doors of the FA, but the outcome was unsurprising in light of the generous volume of media: the employment contract was terminated with immediate effect by ‘mutual agreement’. While not strictly a dismissal, comments made by Allardyce had brought the integrity of the game into question and it appeared he exploited his seniority, rendering his position untenable.
Setting the standards
This leads us to pose the question: what standards should a senior employee be held to? Employers often assume that the more senior an employee becomes so too do the standards to which they are held. However, when considering dismissals an employment tribunal is only concerned with ‘reasonableness’. And the goalposts of what is considered reasonable tend to shift on a case-by-case basis. Often the more senior an employee is the more difficult it becomes to establish what ‘reasonable’ actually means.
The simple reality is that a senior employee is likely to be more influential and their actions are likely to have a greater impact when compared to a junior employee. It is for this reason that senior staff in all sectors are expected to uphold the values of their employers and to pay the price if they fail to do so.
The pursuit of privacy
This case highlights the difficulty in knowing where to draw the line between what is expected when an employee is on duty and their freedom to conduct their private life. This is made more difficult by the presence of social media and the increasingly blurred lines between ‘working’ and ‘non-working’ time.
Although there is no hard and fast answer to this, you can be certain that any comment that brings integrity or repute into question can have a damaging effect on the employee’s career. There is an assumption that anyone who has made it to the top has the ability to do the job, and this is rarely called into question. Instead spectators scrutinise and dissect the effect their comments have, not only on the speaker’s integrity, but also on their consumers.
Building company values
Ensuring that staff are aware of what is expected of them is vital to achieving high standards. Providing training and offering guidance on how best to implement these high standards, including the company’s culture, ethical and moral values, forms part of this. It is important to remind workers of the impact their behaviour has on the business. For senior posts it is even more important that employers establish and instil broad principles about private business interests and possible conflicts of interest. This will often involve ‘common sense’ discussions and assessments.
When deciding whether a comment is appropriate or when assessing the risk in a discussion being made ‘public’, we can look to Donald Trump’s recently exposed decade-old comments and ask ourselves: 'what do I want my legacy to be?'
Richard Santy is partner at Mills & Reeve
