Helped Needed on Employment Tribunal - Personal Emails

[LP1106]

Evening all. I am wondering if anyone has any advice they can offer me, on this long story!

I have worked for a company for 5 years now as an associate partner and have turned a 40k a year division into a 450k. I have said this only to highlight the reason why my boss was so annoyed when I handed my notice in. I have been struggling with stress and anxiety for a few months and handed my notice in based off of that. This was met with some verbal bullying and teasing, but ultimately I agreed to stay professional the whole time.

They offered me a self employment contract, but only to tie me in for an additional year as to not steal clients. After some consideration, I decided not to proceed, after have abusive messages over something that was the bosses mistake. For the past 6 months I admit, he has been a bully and has regularly berated me in front of staff and generally runs our workplace like his personal dictatorship.

The main event however and the bit I am desperately needing advice for is when he called me into his office today to serve me with a notice of disciplinary action. I have done 3-4 private jobs for close friends out of work hours and away from any company owned computers or software. The only way he could have found these documents were by accessing my personal email, which he logged into via my work PC. There is no term in my contract regarding the access of private/personal emails so I am rather shocked.

The tribunal is later this week and my main questions are

1) Can an employer access your personal email/USB drive when no statement or policy has been addressed via my contract
2) Could I counter complain about bullying in the work place
3) Where the work was done out of hours and away from any work related hardware/software, do they have a case? My contract states
a) no providing products or service directly from the company
b) no subjecting the employee to unreasonable time demand that prevent the employee from devoting proper attention to his or her responsibilities
c) Which is so operated that the employees involvement with the outside business activity will reflect adversely on the company.

I dont believe any of these statements to be true, but would love some advice.

Kind Regards

[ULA]

I am a little confused as you talk about being given notice of disciplinary action, yet you mention a tribunal later this week, are you actually meaning the disciplinary meeting?

If it is the disciplainary meeting, then have you been given all the evidence they are going to rely on at the meeting, including any policies or procedures they are relying on and where you given the right to be accompanied?

How much of your notice period is there still remaining?

Why was your personal email details on your work computer?

Is there any for example an IT policy that covers the personal usage or non usage of work provided computers?

Is there any clause in your contract about only working for your employer/not taking on a second job without permission?

Would the private work be considered as competitive to your employer and do you have any restricitve covenants?

Sorry lots of questions but until I have the answers cannot provide a detailed response to your questions without the information, except on your question 2 which would in fact require you to raise a grievance relating to the instances where you believe you have been bullied, for which you will need date/s, time/s, what happened and details of any witnesses who may have seem what happened.