How to Make a Progressive Discipline Checklist
It is never an easy thing whenever general managers are required to discipline employees. But they also know that it is something that has to be done to ensure that employees follow the rules of the company. These rules should never be broken unless they would like to suffer the consequences that come along with the action.
This is why those who are in charge of other employees are required to understand the disciplinary process and procedures of the company that they work for. This article will focus on how you can create a employee checklist that ensures the proper implementation of the steps to progressive discipline.
What needs to be done before deciding on a disciplinary action?
If you are going to impose disciplinary actions on a particular employee, you have to follow these steps before you do so:
- Know the problem first. You cannot really do anything unless you know what violation the employee has committed. You need to gather all the important information regarding the incident report such as the names of the people who were involved, the location where the violation took place, the date and time when it occurred, and the names of any people who witnessed the event.
- Do a proper investigation. There will be a lot of claims from different people regarding the violation, but you cannot just act from their words alone. You need all the sufficient evidence that will allow you to make a clear and proper judgement on whether or not the accused deserves to be punished. So, ask for any witness statements that will require people to provide information on what they saw during the incident and you should state that any false information that is provided will be held against them. If there is a victim involved in the offense, then you may ask for things that will help prove his claims such as messages that were sent and received between both parties or even pictures of the incident itself.
Make sure that you do all of that before you can decide on any form of disciplinary action.
How to decide the level of discipline that will be imposed
A lot of managers make the mistake of treating employees differently when they have committed a workplace violation. Those who are performing at the highest level who commit such atrocities will not be reprimanded as harshly, but those who perform poorly or even at an average rate will be strictly punished for the offense. Managers should always base the disciplinary action on the offense that has been committed and not on the employee that has committed them. So, before you can decide on the level of discipline that you should impose, you should consider things such as:
- The severity of the offense the employee has committed. Not all offenses will result in immediate employee termination. You need to figure out what warrants an employee from getting a verbal warning instead of getting fired.
- The employee’s previous disciplinary record. While the are some employees who commit offenses very rarely, there are some who commit the same one over and over. Let us say that you have reprimanded an employee before about bullying in the workplace, but the offender still continues to harass others despite the warning letter that he has received. This should give you a very good reason to either suspend or even terminate the employee for ignoring the warnings and still continuing the offense.
- The discipline other employees have been handed for previous similar offenses. As previously mentioned, disciplinary actions letters should be decided on the type of offense that was committed and not the person who has committed them. So, no matter how high up in the ranks a particular employee review, if he has done something that warrants termination checklist template, then you should not turn a blind eye to this and bring up it up with the employee as soon as possible.
Disciplinary action procedures
While it is not the same for every company, a majority follow these progressive steps when it comes to disciplinary actions:
- Verbal warnings. These are usually for very minor offenses such as a drop in an employee’s quality of performance review or overuse of social media sites policy in the workplace. All you need to do is give these employees a stern talking to in a private room in the company so that they will be able to better understand what they did wrong and what you expect out of them in the future.
- Warning letters. These are for more serious offenses. If an employee has failed to comply with a particular policy within the workplace, but it is one that is not too severe that it qualifies the person for termination, then you may hand this person a warning letter which states that this offense is one that is not to be taken lightly.
- Suspension. This is for employees who have committed repeated offenses or an offense of a high degree of severity. A good example is a claim of sexual harassment checklist against an employee.This is a serious claim in which the offender must be immediately suspended while management report conducts a thorough investigation of the matter.
- Termination. This is the disciplinary action that has to be taken if an employee commits certain action report that endanger the company’s well-being. A good example would be sharing confidential information with competitors of the company. So, if you discover that an employee has committed an offense that is extremely serious, then you have every right to terminate letter this person.
For more articles about issues in the workplace and how to deal with them, check out the rest of our posts.
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