Grievances With Two Addresses
A complaint about you goes to their employer, who has no authority over you, and that is the whole difficulty.
Whether the person feels part of your company
Career progression
Your own share scheme
Who notices when it is going wrong
YoursThe provider'sCrosses the twoNeither contract
Four matters, and no share: what any one agreement covers differs by agreement. One crosses both, and the handoff is where these arrangements fail. Three sit in neither contract. The section where the most arrangements are lost, and the one no document addresses.
A complaint about how this person is treated goes to their employer, who has no authority over you and cannot change anything you do. That is the whole difficulty and it is structural rather than anybody's fault.
The practical lesson in “Grievances With Two Addresses” is that a third-party arrangement still leaves day-to-day management with the operating team. Used for remote desktop monitoring software, visit the provider website can make time and project context easier to review, provided the purpose is disclosed, access is limited and every consequential inference receives human review.
Your own grievance process, meanwhile, covers employees, and they are not one.
Teams reviewing “Grievances With Two Addresses” can cross-check their approach against the EURES European employment information. The comparison should produce written questions for the provider, adviser or internal owner instead of a copied checklist.
The two routes, and what each can do
The provider can investigate as employer, record the complaint, and raise it with you as a customer. They cannot discipline your manager or change your practices.
You can investigate as the company whose people are involved, and act on whatever you find. What you cannot do is give the person the procedural rights your own staff have.
The gap
A person in this position has a complaint mechanism that reaches somebody with no power, and a company with power that has no mechanism for them.
Closing that gap is a decision for you to take deliberately, because nothing will do it automatically.
The decision costs very little. What it needs is somebody senior enough to say that the company's own process applies here, and a note recording that they did.
Deciding the policy before you need it
State plainly: complaints about the work, the team or a manager will be handled under our own process, applied to them as though they were staff, and they may also raise anything with their employer.
Written down once, communicated at onboarding:
Complaints about the work, the team or a manager will be handled under our own process, applied to you as though you were staff. You may also raise anything with your employer, and doing so will not be held against you.
It removes the worst version, which is somebody who does not know where to go.
Where the provider must be involved
Discrimination, harassment, safety, and anything the person characterises as formal. The employer has legal obligations that cannot be discharged by you.
Tell them, early, and do not run a parallel process without coordination. Two investigations into the same facts help nobody.
What you should not do
Investigate a serious complaint yourself and tell the person that settles it. Discourage them from raising it with their employer. Suggest that going to the provider would complicate things.
Each of those is understandable and each is the kind of thing that reads very badly afterwards.
Where the complaint is about the provider
Payroll errors, unanswered queries, a local contact who is unhelpful, something in the contract they do not understand.
That one is squarely yours to escalate, as the customer, and it is the most useful thing you can do for them. They have no commercial leverage; you have all of it.
Tell the person you will do it and tell them what came back. An escalation they never hear about looks identical to one that never happened.
Who gets to see it
A complaint routed through two companies is seen by more people than one routed through one. The person should be told that before they decide where to raise it.
Saying so is not discouraging them. Not saying so and letting them discover it is the problem.
Retaliation
The person is more exposed than an employee: less protection in practice, less visibility, and an arrangement that can be ended commercially.
Whether that fear is justified matters less than the fact that it is reasonable. Address it explicitly rather than hoping it is not present.
Anonymous reporting
Whistleblowing and ethics lines are usually scoped to employees and sometimes contractors. Check whether this population is covered.
In several jurisdictions there are legal requirements about the scope of such channels, which is a question for the provider or for local advice rather than for your own policy owner.
Recording what happened
What was raised, when, to whom, what was done, and what was communicated back. Kept by you as well as by the provider.
Without your own record you are dependent on a supplier's file that you may not be entitled to see.
When it is about you personally
The hardest version. Say plainly that they may raise it with their employer, that you will not hold it against them, and that your company will handle it through somebody other than you.
Then make sure that is true, which means somebody else in your company has to own it. Arranging that in advance is better than improvising it under pressure.
What goodwill cannot substitute for
A route with teeth. Everything in this note depends on your company choosing to extend its own process to somebody it does not employ, and that choice can be withdrawn or simply forgotten when the people who made it move on.
The person's real protection is whatever their employer can do, which is limited, plus whatever you decide to do, which is discretionary. Saying that honestly is better than describing a safety net that is actually a policy somebody wrote down one afternoon.