Discipline: What to Do When Employees Behave Badly

Employee Discipline is a commonly used term but far too negative for my tastes. So instead of a discipline procedure, let's view the subject as part of the entire process of managing employee performance.

The heart of managing performance is the daily managing, organizing and leading of employee's work.

The good end of the process is excellent performance through pay raises, promotions and bonuses.

The middle band of the this spectrum is managing satisfactory work and hopefully improving it.

Things begin to unravel when we get into unsatisfactory and poor work performance. Both of these must be corrected.

Then we hit the turbulence of employee behavior that is unacceptable and necessitates corrective action on the part of the Company, which  is hopefully improve behavior instead of being punitive. The final step in this no fun end of the process is termination of employment.

This kind of behavior can be work performance or other bad behaviors that require correction. A few examples are:
-harassment
-fighting
-theft
-falsifying records
-illegal property in the workplace

Again, these are just a few examples. Human behaviors are as varied and numerous as the number of humans there are.

So we are going to discuss the array of Company actions which are used to correct unacceptable employee behavior.

Lance