Progressive Discipline

Dianna

How many people have a progressive discipline system in place? If you do, how does it work?

NaeNae55

We find that most issues can be solved just by bringing it to the employee's attention. However, this is a brief summary from our employee manual:

Verbal Warning: Talk to the employee privately about the problem, outline expectations, give the employee a chance to respond, and then set up a timeline for improvement. Consequences for another occurrance are also discussed. All of this is documented and a copy given to the employee, and HR usually sits in though is not required to.

Written Warning: All of the above, but it is all written up on a Notice of Disciplinary Action form which includes a brief record of past warnings, employee comments, outline of corrective action required by employee, time period to correct, notation of probation period, statement of next level of discipline if behavior is not corrected.

Final Written Warning: About the same as Written Warning, but consequences are termination or demotion.

Consequences, etc, are all determined by the nature of the offense, and some offenses are serious enough to skip steps (or even go straight to termination). The timeline for improvement is considered a probationary period, and affects raises. That is, merit increases are based on a prorated year if the employee was in a probationary period (max probationary period is 6 months).

Employees may be suspended up to 3 days during investigations.

Written and Final Written Warnings must be approved by HR. All employees may go through a grievance procedure if they think they have been treated unfairly.

Hope this helps!

Margaret Morford

Mine is much the same as the one NaeNae55 describes except any acceleratin of steps has to be approved by HR to insure consistency and to protect the supervisor from a charge of discrimination. It also only gives an employee in his/her introductory period one warning before termination. The cycle for corrective action is six months with the idea being that if the employee has had no corrective action for six months, the manager begins again with the verbal warning. This encourages employees to improve rather than punishes them. I'll fax you a copy with the form if you will e-mail me your fax number.

Margaret Morford
theHRedge
615-371-8200
[email]mmorford@mleesmith.com[/email]
[url]http://www.thehredge.net[/url]