Whether you own a small business or a big one, you have to make sound business decisions every day. Sometimes, it may involve handling employee misconduct. The violations that they commit against business policies should never be taken for granted. It must be dealt with immediately to maintain discipline in the workplace. After all, enforcing your business policies do not only help maintain good working atmosphere in the company, but it allows the company to grow with its employees and reach for business success.
However, disciplining your employees can be precarious if you don’t know how to do it right. Specifically, you have to make sure that disciplinary action of employees who committed the same violation should be the same. You cannot favor one over the other, just because he or she has stayed longer with the company. Being inconsistent will put you in hot water. Employees can claim in court that you have discriminated them at one point, and this could cause the business a lot of money.
Because applying disciplinary actions to employees can lead to law suits, business lawyers often advise their clients to put clean disciplinary standards before they put all their decisions of activities in place. A list of procedures on how to handle employee policy violations should be called into writing. Every employee must be kept aware of such business rules. Moreover, all rules must apply to all.
To help prevent you from being sued for mishandling an employee violation or be filed a discrimination claim in court, here are a few things that you need to keep in mind:
• You must go down to the nature of the problem. Why was there a violation? What was the violation? It is important that you know the character of the problem so you can act and decide on it accordingly.
• You must know what you need to do to deal with the problem, fi it and make sure nobody commits the same mistake again. If re-training of employees is necessary, it must be something you should seriously consider.
• You must give yourself and the employees involved ample time to fix the problem. There’s no reason to hurry to repair the mess, as long as it does not get in the way of the ordinary business transactions. If it does, make sure you assign somebody else to take over the position of those involved, so that business operations won’t be disrupted.
Your consistency in implementing a discipline to all your employees is a must. Being consistent means being able to deal with problems with staff when they arise without letting a single offense pass without proper discipline. If you have concerns, make sure to consult with your lawyer to ensure that the best interest of the business is protected.