Monday, September 9, 2013

What Is Important When Issuing A Written Warning Letter?

What Is Important When Issuing A Written Warning Letter?

By Gregory Covey


A very stressful part of being in a leadership position will be when you are faced with having to issue a written warning letter to an employee in an effort to insure productivity stays and high and morale is maintained. Although it is very hard to believe, but the fact is that your staff is paying close attention to see what you will do if someone is breaking the rules.

Employees from the beginning of time will push the rules if allowed to. This means that if they see that you will do nothing when an employee shows up late, or worse is insubordinate, it sends a strong message that anything goes. Sooner, versus later, productivity will drop and chaos will set in, if you stand by and do nothing.

Before ever producing a written warning letter for anyone on your staff it is very crucial that you take the time to produce and inform everyone of what your rules are so that there is no questions about them. One of the most effective ways to do this is to produce an employee handbook that details all your policies and the penalties if they are violated. Suggested policies could be misconduct, attendance, disrespectful behavior, tardiness, stealing, etc.

One very important factor after you have produced an employee handbook is to make sure that everyone signs for their own copy of it. If you do a quick search online you will learn that you can get a simple template for an employee handbook for a little under fifty dollars. On the other hand if you really want to get something with all the bells and whistles you can spend much more.

Another very important aspect of any employee discipline program is to make sure that you are treating everyone the same. More law suits are filed over companies that treat one employee differently than another when violating the exact same policy. You may try to justify your actions by stating that one employee is a better performer than another one, but the bottom line is if they violate your policy then treat them the same. Selective enforcement will get you in big trouble.

Facts and facts only should be contained within the written warning letter itself. Never use words that refer to emotions like "I think" or "I believe." When finally sitting down and composing the written warning it should have the following elements; what rule they violated, specifically how they violated it, if they have been disciplined before, how they must improve, and then what will happen to them if they violate the policy again.

One consideration you should make as you put your disciplinary program together is to begin with the least severe type of discipline, and then if someone continues to violate your policies progress to more severe punishments. Of course there will be those times that you will immediately have to terminate someone, for instance like fighting. When you are designing your employee handbook it is a good time to think about those choices. You should be just fine provided you insure that you are treating your entire staff fairly and consistently.




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