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How to Raise a Concern About a Coworker

Every other tool here writes a document about you— your raise, your review, your exit. This is the only one whose subject is somebody else: a named colleague who isn’t in the room, didn’t agree to be described, and will very often end up reading or hearing what you wrote. Three things follow. Conduct and effect can be defended and character cannot — a manager can act on “the handover didn’t arrive on the 4th and I rebuilt it that evening”, and the sentence about what kind of person they are is the only claim that gets tested instead of the conduct. It can’t be unsaid, and past a certain door it can’t be stopped: the process belongs to your employer and you become a witness in it rather than its client. And the category chooses the door — a quiet word is right for a style clash and wrong for something that may be unlawful, which is why nothing here rules on which of those this is. You get what to write down first, the four doors and what each one starts, the opening at no more than 155 words, the five things to leave out, the three replies that come back, and the four questions this page won’t answer — each with the policy, representative or qualified person that holds it.

Sample concern plan

Generated for: Operations Analyst, two years there, a colleague’s handover has been late or wrong for about eight months, I’ve rebuilt it myself most times, mentioned it once in a one-to-one in July and nothing changed

Write this down first — The record is free, it’s reversible, and it’s the only thing here you can’t recreate later; keep it somewhere that isn’t your employer’s systems, because access to a work account ends the day the job does. Reading it back is usually what tells you which conversation this actually is. For each instance: the date and what was actually done or not done. Who else was present or affected. What it changed about your ability to do your own job. What you did to cover it, and how long that took. What you’ve already raised, with whom, and on what date. Nothing in that list is a judgement about the person — that’s deliberate, and it’s the part that makes it usable.

The real one is written against the incidents you actually have, how long it’s been going on, and what you’ve already said and to whom — and it never invents an incident, a date, a quotation or a witness, and never rules on whether what you describe counts as anything with a name. The first one is free — no card. See what a credit costs.

First one is free — no card needed.

Credits

— credits available

This is the single input that most changes the advice, because one incident and an eighteen-month pattern are different documents needing different instruments. “I don’t really know” is a real answer — it comes back as the first thing to go and reconstruct from your own calendar and messages, never as a duration this page invented for you. Nothing here estimates how long anything has been happening, how many times it happened, or how long any stage of any process takes. What it will do is choose the instrument: a single incident and a long pattern need different conversations, and using the wrong one is the commonest reason this goes nowhere.

How long you’ve been there changes who you’d raise this with and how, so it’s worth stating — but it comes back as context for the routing, never as a reason this page has decided makes you more or less credible. It is never used to judge whether you’ve earned the right to raise it, whether you’ll be believed, or how any of this will land.

These aren’t the same conversation, and the category is what chooses the door. It might be harassment or discriminationis the branch where this page deliberately refuses to rule — a wrong answer either way is expensive, so it gives you the record to keep and the three places that question can actually be put. Cutting corners on safety or the rulesis the one where the exposure lands on somebody who isn’t in the conversation at all, and where the informal route is usually how a report becomes a chat and then becomes nothing. They block my workis a process problem wearing a person’s face; framed as a bottleneck it gets fixed, framed as a person it gets defended. It’s affecting the teamis where “everyone thinks” sinks legitimate concerns and exposes people who never agreed to it. Nothing here will tell you whether what you’re describing counts as anything with a name — and it won’t tell you it doesn’t, either.

This decides which section gets written, and it’s the field people skip — which is why so many of these end in “thanks for telling me” and nothing else. Get the behaviour to stop is served best by the smallest instrument and worst by a formal one, which optimises for a finding rather than a change. Get it on recordis handled honestly: you control what you write and you don’t fully control what it triggers, and a request to keep something informal isn’t always a manager’s to grant. Change how the work is arranged is the most achievable outcome on the page, because a manager can move work without making a finding about anybody. Find out what raising it would set offis the only one that changes what you do first, and its deliverable is a map of questions with the policy, representative or qualified person that holds each one.

Give the specific incidents — what was done, on what date, what it changed about your ability to do the job, and what you did to cover it — plus anything you’ve already raised and with whom. Dated conduct is the whole product here. Please don’t paste chat logs, message threads or your colleague’s emails— nothing here will quote, interpret or characterise them, so putting them in only leaves them here. No name is needed, and no other colleague’s name, words or private complaint goes into the draft either: it can be forwarded, filed, or read aloud to the person it describes. We never invent an incident, a date, a quotation or a witness, so anything you don’t supply comes back as a bracketed placeholder.

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Also explore:

Asking to Move to Another Team →Declining Extra Work →Telling Your Boss You Made a Mistake →Disputing a Performance Review Rating →“A Time You Worked With a Difficult Coworker” →