Disciplining Employees
Employee discipline is a tool that managers rely on to communicate to employees that they need to change a behavior. For example, some employees are habitually late to work, ignore safety procedures, neglect the details required for their job, act rudely to customers, or engage in unprofessional conduct with coworkers. Employee discipline entails communicating the unacceptability of such behavior along with a warning that specific actions will follow if the employee does not change the behavior.85
Employee discipline is usually performed by supervisors, but in self-managed work teams employee discipline may be a team responsibility. For instance, at Hannaford Bros., a food distribution center outside Albany, New York, the 120 warehouse employees are divided into five teams, each of which has a serious conduct committee. The committee handles employee discipline and makes recommendations to management, including counseling and even termination. Management usually adopts these recommendations. The committees generally come up with creative solutions for handling discipline problems. In fact, it has rarely proved necessary to terminate an employee.86
Employee and employer rights may come into conflict over the issue of employee discipline. Sometimes employees believe they are being disciplined unfairly. In such situations, a company’s HR staff may help sort out disputed rights. This HR contribution is particularly valuable because it can enable the employee and the supervisor to maintain an effective working relationship.
Two different approaches to employee discipline are widely used: (1) progressive discipline and (2) positive discipline. In both these approaches, supervisors must discuss the behavior in question with their employees. Managers almost invariably find it difficult to confront an employee for disciplinary purposes. Reasons for their discomfort range from not wanting to be the bearer of bad news, to not knowing how to start the discussion, to a fear that the discussion will get out of control. The Manager’s Notebook, “Five Steps for Effective Disciplinary Sessions,” offers some guidelines that should make it easier for managers to handle an admittedly distasteful task.
MANAGER’S NOTEBOOK Five Steps for Effective Disciplinary Sessions
Ethics/Social Responsibility
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Determine whether discipline is called for. Is the problem an isolated infraction or part of a pattern? Consult with HR experts and get some feedback before making a disciplinary decision.a
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Outline clear goals for the discussion in your opening remarks. Do not rely on indirect communication or beat around the bush. The employee should gain a clear idea of your expectations for improvement.b
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Ensure two-way communication. The most helpful disciplinary meeting is a discussion, not a lecture. The objective of the meeting, after all, is to devise a workable solution, not to berate the employee.c
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Establish a follow-up plan. The agreement to a follow-up plan is crucial in both the progressive and positive disciplinary procedures. It is particularly important to establish the time frame in which the employee’s behavior is to improve.d
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End on a positive note. You may want to emphasize the employee’s strengths so that he or she can leave the meeting believing that you—and the company—want the employee to succeed.e
Progressive Discipline
The most commonly used form of discipline, progressive discipline , consists of a series of management interventions that gives employees opportunities to correct their behavior before being discharged. Progressive discipline procedures are warning steps, each of which involves a punishment that increases in severity the longer the undesirable behaviors persist.87 If the employee fails to respond to these progressive warnings, the employer is justified in discharging the individual.88
Progressive discipline systems usually have three to five steps, although a four-step system is the most common, as shown in Figure 14.3. Minor violations of company policy involve using all the steps in the progressive discipline procedure. Serious violations, sometimes referred to as gross misconduct, can result in the elimination of several steps and sometimes even begin at the last step, which is discharge. Examples of gross misconduct are assaulting a supervisor and falsifying employment records. However, most applications of discipline involve minor rule infractions like violating a dress code, smoking at an inappropriate time or place, or being habitually late. Figure 14.4 shows more examples of minor and serious violations.
FIGURE 14.3
Four Steps in a Progressive Discipline Procedure
A four-step progressive discipline procedure includes the following steps:89
| Minor Violations | Serious Violations |
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FIGURE 14.4
Categories of Employee Misconduct
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Verbal warning An employee who commits a minor violation receives a verbal warning from the supervisor and is told that if this problem continues within a specific time period, harsher punishment will follow. The supervisor provides clear expectations for improvement.
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Written warning The employee violates the same rule within the specified time period and now receives a written warning from the supervisor. This warning goes into the employee’s records. The employee is told that failure to correct the violation within a certain time period will result in more severe treatment.
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Suspension The employee still fails to respond to warnings and again violates the work rule. The employee is now suspended from employment without pay for a specific amount of time. He or she receives a final warning from the supervisor, indicating that discharge will follow upon violating the rule within a specified time period.
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Discharge The employee violates the rule one more time within the specified time period and is discharged.
Figure 14.3 illustrates how an employer would use progressive discipline with an employee who has a pattern of unexcused absences from work.
For infractions that fall between the categories of minor violation and serious violation, one or two steps in the procedure are skipped. These infractions are usually handled by supervisors, who give the employees an opportunity to correct the behavior before discharging them. For example, two employees get into a fistfight at work, but there are mitigating circumstances (one employee verbally attacked the other). In this situation, both employees may be suspended without pay and warned that another such violation will result in discharge.
Positive Discipline
The emphasis on punishment in progressive discipline may encourage employees to deceive their supervisor rather than correct their actions. To avoid this outcome, some companies have replaced progressive discipline with positive discipline , which encourages employees to monitor their own behaviors and assume responsibility for their actions.
Positive discipline is similar to progressive discipline in that it too uses a series of steps that increase in urgency and severity until the last step, which is discharge. However, positive discipline replaces the punishment used in progressive discipline with counseling sessions between employee and supervisor. These sessions focus on getting the employee to learn from past mistakes and initiate a plan to make a positive change in behavior.90 Rather than depending on threats and punishments, the supervisor uses counseling skills to motivate the employee to change. Rather than placing blame on the employee, the supervisor emphasizes collaborative problem solving. In short, positive discipline alters the supervisor’s role from adversary to counselor.
To ensure that supervisors are adequately prepared to counsel employees, companies that use positive discipline must see that they receive appropriate training either from the company’s own HR department or from outside professional trainers. At Union Carbide, which began using positive discipline in the late 1970s, managers attend a two-day training program to gain familiarity with positive discipline policies and practices. Because Union Carbide had long used a progressive discipline approach, a key element of the training is helping managers abandon their tendency to respond to performance problems in a punitive way. Managers also receive training in documenting their discussions specifically, factually, and defensibly.91
A four-step positive discipline procedure starts with a first counseling session between employee and supervisor that ends with a verbal solution that is acceptable to both parties. If this solution does not work, the supervisor and employee meet again to discuss why it failed and to develop a new plan and timetable to solve the problem. At this second step, the new agreed-upon solution to the problem is written down.
If there is still no improvement in performance, the third step is a final warning that the employee is at risk of being discharged. Rather than suspend the employee without pay (as would happen under progressive discipline), this third step gives the employee some time to evaluate his or her situation and come up with a new solution. In doing so, the employee is encouraged to examine why earlier attempts to improve performance did not work. Some companies even give the employee a “decision-making day off” with pay to develop a plan for improved performance.92
Managers often resist this aspect of positive discipline because they feel that it rewards employees for poor performance. Some suspect that employees intentionally misbehave to get a free day off. According to the employee relations director of Union Carbide, which uses a paid decision-making day off as part of its disciplinary procedure, this is not so. The company believes a paid day off is more effective than the unpaid suspension used in progressive discipline procedures because (1) workers returning from an unpaid suspension often feel anger or apathy, which may lead to either reduced effectiveness on the job or subtle sabotage; (2) paying the employee for the decision-making day off avoids making the employee a martyr in the eyes of coworkers; and (3) paying for the decision-making day off underscores management’s “good faith” toward the employee and probably reduces the chances that the employee will win a wrongful discharge suit if he or she is eventually terminated.93
Failure to improve performance after the final warning results in discharge, the fourth step of the positive discipline procedure. Incidents of gross misconduct (such as theft) are treated no differently under a positive discipline procedure than under a progressive discipline procedure. In both systems, theft will most likely result in immediate discharge.
In addition to the costs of training managers and supervisors in appropriate counseling skills and approaches, positive discipline has another drawback. Counseling sessions require a lot of time to be effective, and this is time during which both the supervisor and employee are not working on other tasks. Nonetheless, positive discipline offers considerable benefits to both employees and managers. Employees prefer it because they like being treated with respect by their supervisors. Counseling generally results in a greater willingness to change undesirable behaviors than discipline does. Supervisors prefer it because it does not demand that they assume the role of disciplinarian. Counseling makes for better-quality working relationships with subordinates than discipline does. In addition, under a system of positive discipline, managers are much more likely to intervene early to correct a problem.
Finally, positive discipline can have positive effects on a company’s bottom line, as evidenced at Union Carbide. Studies in five of the company’s facilities have shown an average decline in absenteeism of 5.5 percent since the company switched from punitive to positive discipline procedures. Moreover, in one unionized facility at the company, disciplinary grievances went down from 36 in one year to 8 in the next. Union Carbide executives estimate that taking an employee complaint through all steps of the grievance procedure (short of arbitration) costs approximately $400 at this facility, thus the switch in discipline procedures saved the company over $11,000 per year.94 Pennzoil, General Electric, and Procter & Gamble also have adopted the positive discipline procedure and have reported successful outcomes with it.95 In addition, many city police forces and some universities use positive discipline. For example, one university used positive discipline with a professor who would yell at, criticize, and belittle students when they volunteered the wrong answers to his questions or avoided class participation. The department chair and the professor worked together to develop a plan to control his temper in the classroom. The department chair saw a positive change in the professor’s classroom behavior that would not have occurred had the chair used a more confrontational form of discipline, such as the progressive discipline procedure.