Staff Disputes and the Referee Role

Nobody warns you about this bit. Two members of staff don't get along. Maybe it's a personality clash. Maybe one of them feels the other doesn't pull their weight. Maybe there's a disagreement about the right way to clean the fermenter or serve a customer. In a team of two or three people, that kind of friction is impossible to ignore.

And suddenly you're not a brewer anymore. You're a mediator. You're having awkward one-to-one conversations, trying to be fair to both sides, trying to keep the peace without taking sides, and trying not to say anything that could land you in legal trouble later. You didn't sign up for this. You signed up to make beer.

The worst disputes are the quiet ones. The passive-aggressive atmosphere. The person who's perfectly professional on the surface but is making the other person's life miserable in small, deniable ways. These situations poison a small team faster than anything else, and if you don't deal with them, your best people will leave and your worst will stay.

You need proper procedures for this — a written grievance process, a disciplinary framework, documentation of conversations and decisions. Not because you want to be bureaucratic, but because if it ever reaches a tribunal, "we had a chat about it" is not a defence. Employment law doesn't care that you're a three-person brewery. It applies to you the same way it applies to a company with three thousand employees.