Disciplinary Policy - Decreasing Pay?
ambarrena
2 Posts
Hi everyone,
I am faced with a dilemma and I am hoping that there are some kind people out there who can help me. I was asked to work with our DOO to put together, as part of our disciplinary actions, that after a service technician gets written up three times due to failure to perform to company standards, that they will accept an automatic 15% deduction in their pay scale.
Somehow, I don't believe this is legally feasible. Can someone please enlighten me?
Comments
With the exception of the FLSA minimum wage barrier, then unless your state or CBA says you can't, you certainly can. In the absence of a contract, employment at will holds and employees work, in many respects, at the whim of management. Managerial whimsicality can tick a lot of people off and cause problems, so it is not recommended, but it's perfectly legal. It's perfectly legal to terminate employment by lottery for the simple fact that you feel like ruining someone's day. That's actually more legal than the documented versions of some (non-countable) performance based terminations I've reviewed. My point is that legality doesn't always make sanity and it often makes much better sense to run business based on what's sane (and legal) than on what is merely legal.
I think there are workforce management problems that may trump the legality of your DOO's plan that you or your DOO should discuss with your top HR person or your CFO. In fact, messing with someone's pay may actually be more expensive than their mistakes (and the money savings your DOO hopes to gain). When you mess with people's pay, they can get jaded about the job and start stealing from the company or monkey wrenching jobs in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways. My experience is that people often become more bitter about reductions in pay than over terminations, properly documented and administered. This kind of practice, in my opinion, is more likely to spur interest in union activity or consultation with a lawyer than employment termination. You can end up with some pretty disgruntled people and it might just be better to have them out of the Company. There was a time when we would demote non-performing supervisors but, in the end, it never worked out: poor perfoming supervisors in that department are now dismissed.
I have to agree with TXHRGuy that you are setting yourself up for a disgruntled workforce. If a tech is not living up to performance standards after three warnings, then you need to ask yourself why. Is the ee simply unable to perform the job, in which case they should be mentored or terminated; or are they failing to meet performance standards due to lack of training and skills, in which case it's the fault of management failing to properly train the employee. <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
Once you announce this new policy, you should expect most if not all your techs to be angry along with ee's in in other departments. A reduction in the rate of pay will be seen as punishment and heavy handed, especially since you mention no time limit on this reduction or how you plan to get the ee to meet the performance standards. This will reverberate throughout your company and will create more and farther reaching problems than you or the DOO can anticipate. I think this is a bad road to go down.
I agree with the other two posters that this is not a good idea. Let's say you did put this policy into effect, what happens if the employee continues to not perform to standards? Are you going to terminate them? What happens if performance improves? Are you going to increase his/her pay back to where it was before?
I am of the opinion that if you are going to discipline for standards then you use a progressive disciplinary process (such as verbal, written, final written then termination) and you also incorporate retraining in there to show that you have tried everything to help this employee improve performance. I agree that all you are going to do is make the employees upset at a policy of this nature. If you are having a large problem with performance standards then maybe retraining of the whole team is necessary or maybe you need to look at your standards again and make sure they are an accurate reflection of what is obtainable. What are your top performers doing? Are there things these performers are doing that your lowest performers are not doing?