Managing Employees with Conflicting Beliefs - Your Questions Answered

Introduction

Controversial topics always result in people having strong opinions and, in the UK today, we have a number of controversial topics. For example, there are different beliefs about the rights and wrongs of the Israel and Palestine conflict, and we have people with gender-critical beliefs, and others who find gender-critical beliefs offensive.

Your employees are entitled to have their opinions, but what do you do when the controversies spill over into work and start to affect what is happening in the workplace? Can you take action if employees cause offence and what are the risks of doing so?

What You Will Learn

This webinar will cover the following:

• A protected belief
• The definition of religion/belief in the Equality Act 2010
• What is a belief
• Examples from case law
• A reasonable management instruction
• Instructing employees not to discuss a belief, or not to be provocative at work
• What amounts to a ‘reasonable’ management instruction
• The outcome of disobeying a reasonable management instruction
• Taking disciplinary action
• Separating out the belief and the behaviour
• Setting out standards for behaviour
• When dismissal could potentially be fair

This pre-recorded webinar will be available to view from Tuesday 17th February 2026

Alternatively, you can gain access to this webinar and 1,900+ others via the MBL Webinar Subscription. Please email webinarsubscription@mblseminars.com for more details.