Tips for Disciplining Employees

Employees are people, and at times, people mess up. Whether their error was mismanaging time and getting behind on a project or they’re slacking off on the job, an infraction is an infraction. With that said, not every single mishap is something that rises to the occasion of termination or even severely disciplining employees, and knowing the difference can improve your employee morale.

The typical measures taken when disciplining employees, while important, can reduce workforce effectiveness, or worse, cause them to lose a job and you to lose efficiency. Let’s look at some ways that you as a supervisor or business owner can motivate rather than scold, and how it can affect the ability and desire of your staff to excel.

Restructure your discipline process

For many businesses – especially smaller ones – disciplining employees is often heated and quick. A few infractions lead to a dismissal, which then requires the time-consuming and costly process of hiring and training a new employee. Businesses and agencies with more complex employee structures are implementing tiered, progressive and “positive” disciplinary processes that are designed to help get employees back on track.

Progressive discipline is a formal process that includes the employee, their direct report supervisor and whomever is above them. The goal is to bring to attention the infractions or difficulties in the employee’s behavior and outline a clear path to remediation.

In a progressive discipline process, the steps would look something like this:

1. The supervisor has a meeting with the employee, one-on-one, with a list of problems they need to correct.

2. If improvement doesn’t occur, the next step would be to involve a formal, written response, detailing how things are not improving or getting worse.

3. A meeting involving the supervisor and their supervisor, along with the employee, would occur. This would be in cases where the employee’s performance simply was not shaping up, and would effectively be a “last warning” before dismissal processes began. This would create a scenario where even if the employee improved in the targeted areas, they would still be “under supervision”, meaning if they slipped up somewhere else, they could still be facing dismissal.

The goal of this process is to guide your employees back to the straight-and-narrow. Many supervisors find during this process that the employee just needed some guidance, or conversely, both employee and supervisor determine that the business isn’t the best fit for the employee and both part ways amicably.

Obviously, this process may be a bit complex for very small operations, but steps can be amended, skipped or lengthened depending on your office’s climate and the severity of the infraction.

Do not make examples out of discipline

Many supervisors take a draconian approach to dealing with employee troubles, and will discipline them in front of other employees. This might be literal – yelling at them (never, ever yell) in front of the office – or on a “reply all” in an email.

Regardless of how it’s done, it’s tacky and it dramatically hurts morale. At the very least, employees who aren’t privately disciplined will often begin to look elsewhere for a job while letting their duties slide considerably, hoping to move on before considerable fallout hits.

Don’t mince words when disciplining employees

Ultimately, whether you move directly to dismissal or you end up on a more progressive path, discipline is not something you or the employee should take lightly. If improvement is to occur, the reasons you’re here and the path forward need to be clear and linear.