Disciplinary Action

Some issues regarding the company’s disciplinary actions towards the employees’ misbehavior has arisen. Usually it is about ethical and legal issues. Some company’s may be too harsh about the decisions and actions towards employee. There are some situations that needed to study well before making actions towards the employee. One of the situations that needed a disciplinary action is when an employee has been consistently missing on staff meetings and an oral warning has already been issued by him. May be the company can give the employee a written warning and give him/her a copy of the documents that will prove his absences on meetings.

After the employee received the letter and still did not attend any meetings, the employee should be demoted. Attending staff meetings is part of the job. Not attending the meetings means not doing his work as an employee. Another situation when an employee has a 30% error rate in data entry for a high tech company. The employee should know that he/she is working in a high tech company and a 30% error rate in data entry is big enough for the company to have some problems. If the problem is on data entry on sales, a problem might occur on accounting. First, the company should give the employee a written and oral warning.

Let the employee be aware of his/her mistakes and then observe if the employee still commits mistakes on the data entry. If after the warning, the error rate still has no improvement, meaning the error rate is not lessen, may be the employee can be transferred to another division. The work may not suit for him. Also, make an investigation if there is a conspiracy behind the error on data entry, the error might be done intentionally. If the employee has been proven to have done the data entry error intentionally and it really affects the company, the company can fire him/her for work.

The employee should do his/her work correctly, mistakes may happen but if the mistakes is so high and is being done continuously, there is a problem with the employee. Additional situation is when an employee is absent from work, on a yearly average, 15% of the time. For this situation, if the absences are still allowed by the company’s policy then there is not much can be done on this situation than to ask the employee to lessen his/her absences and explain to him/her the advantages that he/she and the company will gain if he/she have more time to job. If the absences are not allowed by the company, an oral and written warning can be given.

If this kind of behavior continues after the warning, the employee can be demoted for not attending his/her duty well. If an employee has been arrested for drunk driving during off duty, there is not much to say about this because the employee is not working during the incident and whatever the employee does outside working hours is not the company’s business. What the employee has done is a private matter. The most allowable disciplinary action that can be made is by talking to the employee; tell that the company has heard the incident during his off duty.

The company may also remind the employee in a nice tone and manner that what he/she has done might have an effect on the company and ask him to be careful next time and avoid driving while drunk. Approach the employee as in a way that the company is caring for he employee. That way the employee might not be offended for the company’s action towards the incident because he/she might feel that the company is just caring for his/her safety. The company should study each employee’s misconducts before giving them some disciplinary actions. Let the employee know their mistakes first and then observe if there are changes on their behaviors.