to be accompanied by violence or customer complaint. ACAS have published examples of potentially gross misconduct, including dishonesty, violence, bullying, gross insubordination, gross negligence and bringing the employer into disrepute. The last could be caused by conviction of a crime that affects work through bad publicity. Putting safety at risk could be enough, even just interfering with a safety switch on one machine. So would moonlighting on sick leave. Being a drug addict can be sufficient reason for dismissal. Unprovoked unexpected violence is grounds unless length of service mitigates it - often violence will be provoked by somebody and/or the alleged culprit had a clean record until the outburst or "self-defence". Downloading porn is sufficient, as is hacking. Misusing the internet depends on how much and how inappropriately, and whether there was a policy in place. If there was no policy in place but the conduct was blatant, the dismissal might be unfair but compensation would be reduced to reflect the employee's fault. Borrowing someone's password to access what the employee is entitled to is not enough. Refusal to carry out lawful and reasonable instructions can be enough, unless it effectively changes the employee's job description so much that he can claim the instruction was unreasonable or even amounted to constructive dismissal. The more fundamental the instruction the greater the need for the employee to comply, e.g. the employee must work on a different floor in the same building if asked, but failure to take the rubbish out at the traditional time will not cut it without warnings and frequent re-offending. Even then, a tribunal may suspect that if trivia is being used to dispense with somebody who is presumably useful to the business there must be some hidden agenda. The employee may defeat the allegation by showing that he received conflicting instructions, or if there had been a breach of health and safety he could become a whistleblower making it next to impossible to dismiss him without a settlement. Standard of proof for capability or conduct For capability or conduct, the employer does not have to prove on the balance of probabilities that the employee is incompetent or badly behaved, merely that based on sufficient evidence it honestly believes on reasonable grounds that he is. In the case of conduct, the employer must also base its belief on a reasonable investigation. So the employer could fall over at any