How to create a workplace complaint form (With tips & free templates)

Employees can file complaints for a variety of reasons in today’s business world, as office environments become more common and people spend more time with one another at the workplace. To protect workplace culture and employee satisfaction in the workplace, you should not ignore employee complaints. Knowing your employees' complaints gives you an idea of the workplace situation.

Making sure to address complaints in a timely and effective manner can help keep the work atmosphere positive and avoid bigger problems. In this article, you will learn what a workplace complaint form is, the types of workplace complaint forms, and how to make a workplace complaint form online. Additionally, you will get expert tips to make a better workplace complaint form.

What is a workplace complaint form?

A workplace complaint form is used by employees to fill out to raise their voices about their concerns or expectations in the workplace.

A workplace complaint form is commonly used as a communication bridge for both employees and employers. Through the employee complaint form, many concerns of employees can be heard by human resources or authorized units.

Employees can express themselves through complaint forms to find a solution to their concerns and forward them to the authorized units. By considering how urgent and serious the employee complaint is, you can prevent a situation from getting worse and take steps to prevent it from escalating.

Workplace complaint form types

The complaint might be due to a variety of factors, and it is critical to determine the severity of the complaint and take appropriate action. Ignoring the complaint could lead to a toxic work environment. Therefore, it is important to understand the situation and separate the complaints form according to the content of the complaints.

Types of workplace complaint forms

We put together types of complaint forms to use in your business according to employees' complaints:

📌Sexual and physical harassment: Regardless of gender, individuals can be sexually harassed by someone in the workplace. You must not tolerate such a thing by ignoring it. It affects employee productivity and morale and also negatively affects the company profile. 

By creating a sexual harassment form, you can allow your employees to write about their experiences to be heard about harassment. It may also occur in a physical attack in the workplace, so you can create another workplace bullying and harassment complaint form to understand the incident.

📌Verbal abuse: People might be harassed verbally in various ways, such as making inappropriate jokes, gossiping and spreading rumors, embarrassing themselves in front of others, etc. In this case, you can file a free employee complaint form to make a formal complaint.

📌Discrimination in the workplace: People might be discriminated against by someone based on their race, religion, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, age, color, gender identity, etc. In the end, this kind of discrimination affects personal productivity, morale, and effectiveness in the workplace. So, you can use a discrimination complaint form to understand the incident and take action.

📌Workplace relations: The Workplace Relations Commission is a legal institution that regulates employment rights, industrial relations, and equality laws in the workplace. Knowing your rights in the workplace and checking if they are implemented is critical. If you have trouble with your rights or other workplace issues, you can use the workplace relations complaint form to address your issue.

📌Human relations department complaints: Employees can challenge various issues at work, such as payment issues, working conditions, salary, work causing negative effects on the body, etc. For those complaints, you can use the HR employee complaint form to solve your issue at work.

How to make a workplace complaint form (+ free templates)

Employees face many issues during working hours in the workplace. The company's duty is to focus on the issue at hand and look for a solution to make everything right, but first, you need to understand the situation that occurred in the workplace. To do this, you need an online tool like forms.app that allows you to create workplace complaint forms to gather all the information you need.

You need to know how to create a workplace complaint form so that employees can file an employee complaint. Following the steps below can help you create a better one on the forms app:

1- Login or create a new account

Login to your account

You can easily sign up to forms.app or if you have an account, you can log in immediately. We know that your time is precious, so you can also log in via Google, Facebook, and Apple accounts.

2- Select a free template

You can start from scratch if you want to decide on every element from the start. If you would rather save time, you can select from our user-friendly workplace harassment complaint form templates to quickly get your form up and running. 

Choose a beginning option

This way, you can customize the details that matter most to you. You can also take advantage of the fast usage of AI. You can simply create a workplace complaint form using forms.app AI form generator. 

3- Add your questions and essential fields

The most valuable part of this section is the questions. You can use the ones you created in accordance with business needs, or you can check the ones we provided inside the pre-designed templates to get ideas.

Add your form questions

Once you start creating your form, you can find the date and time section inside the fields, and you can add it easily. Also, you can add a signature section to make the form a legal foundation at the end of the form.

4- Change how your form looks

Change the design of your form

Every business has a distinct color scheme and typography. You can customize the appearance of your form fields to reflect your brand's requirements. You can also add a logo and change the background and theme. By selecting the customize section, you can change the theme to your liking by adjusting font style, text color, and brightness. 

5- Share the form

Share your form

At the final stage, you can choose to embed it on your website or share it across all digital platforms. You may also set up privacy choices like public, limited, and private in the settings. Additionally, you can choose how the form appears on your website when you share the form link. Also, you can send your form by email or make a QR code to make it more technological.

5 Expert tips for a better workplace complaint form

Creating effective and well-designed workplace complaint forms allows you to understand what happened in the first place and prevent possible incidents at work. Knowing your employees' concerns and complaints gives you many advantages and makes the workplace environment better for working. 

Pro tips for workplace complaint forms

To make the process simple and easy to use, there are a few things to keep in mind when you create a user-friendly workplace complaint form. Here are the expert tips for workplace complaint forms:

☎️Add contact information section: The person who makes a complaint fills out the contact information part to specify full name, address, department, and phone number. With that information, you can reach out to the person who has a complaint to inform them about the process.

🗓️Add a date and time field: This field will help you understand the exact date and time the incident was reported.

📝Content of the complaint: This is the section where we try to gather as much information as possible about the complaint’s content. You can ask when and how it happened, and if there is a witness, you can demand witness information.

👁Ask witnesses: It can be challenging to provide evidence of some events without eyewitnesses. If there are one or more, ask witnesses to strengthen the complaint.

✍🏻Signature: In the incident that it becomes apparent during the process that this has evolved into a legal incident, requesting a signature at the end of the form. Please note that this will give the record a legal foundation.

Key points to take away

The number one priority of a company is to ensure the well-being of its employees and protect them from any potential workplace issues. Despite the company's best efforts, these kinds of situations can still arise. To prevent the issues we mentioned above, you need to ensure your employees feel safe in the workplace. 

Once you provide this, your employees' productivity will increase, leading to a more positive work environment and happier workplaces. By using types of complaint forms, you can understand your employees better and address the issue to solve it.

So far, in our article, you have learned what a workplace complaint form is, the types of workplace complaint forms, and how to create one online on forms.app with expert tips.