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CHAPTER 14 Respecting Employee Rights and Managing Discipline

CHALLENGES

After reading this chapter, you should be able to deal more effectively with the following challenges:

1 Understand employee rights.
2 Understand management rights.
3 Become aware of employee rights challenges: a balancing act.
4 Learn practices for administering and managing discipline.
5 Develop competence for managing difficult employees.
6 Become aware of preventing the need for discipline with human resource management.

All employees have rights that are based on laws, company employment policies, and traditions. Employers also have rights that support their authority and what they can expect from their employees. Sometimes these two sets of rights conflict. Consider the following situations:

Employers can use electronic devices to monitor the location of employees while they are on the job.

Source:Monty Rakusen/Getty Images.

▪ Aligo, a Mountain View, California, producer of “mobile services,” sells a product called Worktrack that enables employers to monitor employees electronically to see where they are and what they are doing at any time. Among the principal customers of Worktrack are employers in the heating and air conditioning business. Workers have cell phones equipped with a GPS (global positioning satellite) chip that transmits their locations to computers in the back office. The location coordinates can be compared to the location of the work site where the employee is expected to be. If an employee is not in the right area, he or she is considered to be not working, and a notification will be sent to the employee’s office. The system also tracks how fast the workers drive, so the employer can verify to insurance companies that no one is speeding. This monitoring is legal, because employers have the right to monitor their workers. However, when employees are constantly monitored by an employer, does this practice infringe on employees’ rights to ethical treatment in the workplace?1
▪ Verified Person performs background checks of new hires for employers and then continues to provide automated biweekly updates on an employee’s activities, alerting the company of any new misdemeanor or felony convictions. Automated ongoing screening can be useful for employers in certain industries, such as financial services, that have statutes prohibiting employees convicted of certain crimes from being on the payroll. However, such monitoring could be troubling for white-collar employees who would rather not have their employers discover a marijuana infraction or drunk-driving charge.2
▪ Hearsay Social is a company that lets large companies control how their employees interact with customers on Facebook and other social media. Hearsay Social provides customers such as 24 Hour Fitness with a dashboard to monitor employees on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. The software provided by Hearsay Social looks for compliance violations between employees and customers, such as when bankers discuss an unauthorized deal.3

The Managerial Perspective

The three examples in the chapter opener suggest that the rights of both employees and employers should be clearly spelled out in every employment relationship. The HR department can help in several ways, such as:

▪ Developing and enforcing policies that inform employees of their rights and responsibilities.
▪ Making managers aware of employees’ rights and managers’ obligations to employees.
▪ Acting as an employee advocate, especially in cases where a supervisor misunderstands or disregards discipline policy.

But it is the manager who can make a tremendous difference here. Managers who respect employees’ rights are more likely to have employees with higher levels of morale and job satisfaction than managers who ignore these rights. Respecting employees’ rights also lessens the likelihood of a costly grievance procedure or lawsuit. As a result, managers need to learn what their employees’ rights are, conduct thorough investigations on behalf of employees with a complaint, and learn to administer discipline as a way to correct a behavior or habit that is nonproductive—rather than as a form of punishment.

In this chapter, we examine employee rights and employee discipline. These two issues are closely related to the quality of employee relations (discussed in Chapter 13). Organizations with effective employee relations ensure that their managers respect employees’ rights and use fair and consistent discipline procedures.

First, we examine the concepts of employee rights, management rights, and the employment-at-will doctrine that governs many nonunion employers. Second, we explore some challenges that managers encounter in balancing employee rights with the rights of management. Next, we discuss employee discipline and offer some suggestions for managing difficult employees. We conclude by examining how the HR department can support managers with proactive policies that minimize the need for disciplinary procedures.

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Table of Contents for CHAPTER 14 Respecting Employee Rights and Managing Discipline

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Table of Contents for
CHAPTER 14 Respecting Employee Rights and Managing Discipline