Allocating a senior employee a desk that they believe to be associated with a junior position amounts to a breach of workplace laws, an employment tribunal has ruled.
The panel said being made to sit somewhere in the office where junior staff work could “logically” lead a senior employee to conclude they have been demoted.
As a result, such a seating arrangement could “destroy or seriously damage” the worker’s relationship with bosses and lead to a successful legal claim, they found.
The ruling came in the case of a senior estate agent who resigned because he wanted to sit at a “symbolically significant” desk.
Nicholas Walker had been asked to move branch but was “upset” when he was told he would sit at a “middle” desk rather than the “back” desk, typically where the manager sat.
When his boss heard about the 53-year-old’s resistance to the desk allocation, he said he could not believe “a man of his age” was “making a fuss” about a desk.
Walker – who was also a director of the firm – immediately submitted his resignation and is now set for a payout after successfully suing the firm for unfair constructive dismissal.
The hearing, held in Watford, heard that Walker was branch manager at Robsons in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, from 2017.
In 2022 he was moved to the nearby Chorleywood branch but in May 2023 was asked to move back because his replacement there had resigned.
Daniel Young, the sales director, decided that Walker would share the branch manager role with a more junior colleague but this was not discussed with the estate agent who thought he was just going back to his old role.
The tribunal heard that the desk at the back of the Rickmansworth office had “practical and symbolic” significance as the station that had always been used by the branch manager and because it was where the books and ledgers were kept.
The junior colleague, Matthew Gooder, had already moved to the back desk by the time Walker returned to the office and was told he would be using the middle desk.
Walker told the tribunal he was “upset” at this news as it indicated he would be merely an “assistant manager”. He messaged Young and said: “I am not going back … and sitting in the middle.”
Young did not realise the “significance” of the back desk and did not understand that Walker was concerned about his status being undermined.
The tribunal concluded Walker had been right to see the desk issue as a “demotion”.
Judge Reindorf said: “From [Mr Walker’s] point of view, finding out that Mr Gooder was sitting at the back desk and he would be sitting at the middle desk amounted to being told that he would be assistant manager and Mr Gooder would be branch manager.
“This was a logical conclusion for him to draw in circumstances where communication with him about the logistics of the Rickmansworth move had been poor …
“The tribunal finds [it was] … conduct that was likely to destroy or seriously damage the relationship of trust and confidence.
“Either becoming assistant manager or becoming joint manager with Mr Gooder would have amounted to a demotion by comparison to the role he was performing at Chorleywood and that which he had performed at Rickmansworth previously, since at both offices he had been the sole manager in charge of the branch.”
Walker’s compensation will be decided at a later date.
