We need to help our managers do a better job with discipline. What suggestions do you have for making the process more effective and less adversarial?
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Here’s what you had to say:
- We find the most important thing is to understand the purpose of discipline, which is to encourage better future performance, not to punish.—A.B.
- We seem to do well with discipline as long as we:
- Make sure that our employees know the rules.
- Tell them which rule they have broken and why the rule is important to the company.
- Listen to their excuse, if they have one.
- Tell them what will happen if they do it again.
- Get their agreement on a plan for improvement.
—M.L
- We’ve discovered that we need to specifically state that we are looking for significant and sustained improvement. “Significant” means that they can’t say, “Look, I improved—from six times tardy in the month to five.” “Sustained” so that they cannot improve for a week and then go back to their old ways.—R.Y.
- We find that consistency is important in getting employees to respect our discipline system. For a while, our supervisors were basically setting their own rules, and we had lots of ill feeling, complaints about favoritism, and so on. Now we’ve made our system clearer, and we have trained all our managers and supervisors on how it works. We get pretty consistent enforcement because everyone knows the rules and the norms. Now when an employee is disciplined, the reaction is likely to be that he or she had it coming.—Z.O.