Are You Progressive?

HR Jungle

“I once worked at a company who followed a pattern of disciplinary actions. Now that I have my own business, I’m trying to decide if I really want to do it the same way. Are there options?”

Your HR Survival Tip

There are disciplinary options legally available and they typically fall into two categories: progressive or discretionary.

Progressive Discipline

You have a progressive policy when it specifies what happens for each occurrence. For example:

First offense = Verbal warning Second offense = Written warning #1 Third offense = Written warning #2 Fourth offense = Written warning #3 Fifth offense = Final warning Sixth offense = Termination

The problem with this type of policy is that you may be legally required to follow each step, regardless of the offense. On the other hand, it does give employees sufficient warning that the behavior may lead to termination and can’t be considered discriminatory since the same six actions are used on everyone.

Discretionary Discipline

When you have a discretionary policy, you handle discipline in the way it suggests at the Company’s discretion. We prefer this method because there are some things an employee might do that call for immediate termination and we  [click to read more …]

Walk Away, Rene

“One of my employees got mad and pushed another employee. I believe the one who got pushed was deliberately trying to make the other employee mad. What should I do about this?”

Your HR Survival Tip

Although there is more conversation about violence in the workplace, it doesn’t seem to be stopping it. In fact, we’ve heard about more employees verbally and physically attacking one another than ever before.

There are a few things you can do to prevent this and ways to handle the situation if prevention doesn’t work. The first is recognizing that you, as the business owner or a manager, absolutely must take action. You need to make sure this type of behavior is not condoned or allowed.

There are a variety of possible disciplinary actions you can and should consider, including unpaid suspension, termination, a write-up, anger management classes, harassment classes, probation, etc. How you handle the situation depends greatly on what exactly happened. Make sure you have witnesses write up what they saw and heard.

Here are a few fictional examples and what we might recommend (depending on the details):

Sam and John are yelling at each other in front of others — Write them  [click to read more …]