Fair Work Commission faults Xe's process in sacking a trader who worked from Singapore

Commissioner Alana Matheson answered two questions and came down on different sides of them. On the reason for the sacking she sided with Xe, finding that a valid reason existed ^[12]. On the process she sided with Graham, because Xe did not fully raise with him the matters it relied on when it decided to dismiss him ^[13].

That process ran 15 days ^[16]. Xe emailed Graham on 17 November about what it had found, and by the next day, Matheson said, the "tone ... had clearly pivoted" ^[6]. He was told "there was a case to answer regarding alleged breaches of company policy" ^[6]. Ten days of further emails and a discussion among Xe managers followed ^[7]. The termination letter went out on 2 December ^[8].

The letter relied on what Graham had not produced. Xe said it had carefully reviewed his written submissions and found he had not provided flight screenshots with his name, medical evidence that his partner was unable to travel, or an adequate explanation for not telling his manager he was in Singapore ^[8]. It added that he had followed "absence and approval processes" before, so skipping them was "a conscious choice not to follow" them ^[8]. The published account does not say which of those grounds Xe failed to put to him before deciding.

Graham's own explanations ran long. He said the return flight was rescheduled over a weekend, and that there was no expectation he would contact his manager outside business hours ^[18]. When he logged on, he wrote, "he was bombarded with triaging hundreds of unread emails from his time off, fielding inbound calls and dealing with an eligible complaint from a high-value client" ^[18]. He also said he had not been told about specific hybrid-work policies ^[19]. Matheson's reported grounds did not turn on how Xe weighed any of that. She accepted the reason and faulted the steps taken before the decision ^[12][13].

A skeptic in Xe's position would say the company lost the ruling and kept everything that mattered. Matheson found reinstatement inappropriate and awarded no compensation, in part because Graham's misconduct contributed to his dismissal and he had been paid four weeks in lieu of notice ^[14]. The evidence on candour was poor for him. A Teams message before the commission gave a plumbing problem as his reason for working from home on a day he said he worked from Bali ^[15]. His manager said she had not known he had ever worked remotely from overseas ^[11]. On the money, the skeptic is right. The unfair-dismissal finding still stands, and it rests on how those 15 days were run ^[13].

For an employer whose rules, like Xe's, require prior approval for overseas work and office attendance three times a week ^[4], the choice this quarter is about sequence. Every ground that will appear in a termination letter has to be raised with the employee before the letter is drafted ^[13]. Next quarter, if a dismissal is challenged, that step decides whether a valid reason is enough for the commission to find it fair ^[12].