Social media creator sacked for typos & not posting anything for a month WINS £22,000 payout for ‘unfair dismissal’
A SOCIAL media creator sacked for making typos and not posting anything for a month has won a £22,000 payout.
Anita Briggs produced digital content for the National Museums of Scotland for 16 years before she was “unfairly dismissed”.
Briggs posted about six times a month whereas her colleague would post around 73 times, a tribunal was told.
She would regularly miss deadlines, make spelling errors and on one occasion failed to produce any content for a whole month.
But even when she turned out, her quality of content was “substantially below what was expected”, the hearing unveiled.
After failing three performance reviews, Anita was sacked on the spot.
However, the employment tribunal found Anita had not been given enough warning and awarded her £22,210 in compensation.
THE LEAD UP
Anita was hired by the National Museums of Scotland back in 2009 and worked as a digital media content producer.
Her role consisted of planning, co-ordinating, and creating new content for the organisations social platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and X, formerly known as Twitter.
Russell Dornan, Briggs’ manager, put her on an informal personal improvement plan (PIP) in May 2022 after “concerns” with her performance.
Briggs then failed to produce any content for all of November 2023 – and posted just six times in December.
Although the tribunal added that Briggs had been experiencing a “number of challenging personal issues”.
Briggs then refused a second informal PIP and Dornan left his role the following year.
Once Hannah Barton took over the role, she enforced a PIP onto Briggs and found her efforts to be below par as she’d “produced only two pieces of content” from June to August 2023.
After falling sick for a period of time, Briggs was then informed that a formal PIP would commence until January 2024.
She was told this could result in her dismissal.
Briggs then failed to produce any content for all of November 2023 posted just six times in December.
Barton revealed to Briggs she had “no confidence” in her ability and was sacked on the grounds of lack of capability.
After having her appeal rejected, Briggs took the organisation to an employment tribunal.
She was then awarded compensation as the tribunal found she was not provided with any formal warnings of the potential dismissal.
Stuart Neilson, the employment judge at the tribunal based in Scotland said: “It would be reasonable to expect at least one level of formal warning prior to dismissal. That did not happen here.”
However, he admitted the production of content was “extremely important” for the business.
The National Museums of Scotland has been approached for a comment.