Employee Discipline and Redirection: Taking the punishment out of discipline with performance improvement plans

We’ve been talking about performance maintenance in some of our recent posts. Our whitepaper with Dr. Lee also discussed some great information about employee discipline. Some experts say that there is always a bottom 10% of employee performance that will demand much of supervisory attention. Other experts describe the 80/20 rule that claims that managers spend 80% of their time dealing with the bottom 20% of employees due to their lackluster performance. Either way, there is seldom ever a time when 100% of employees are performing optimally; it simply goes against the law of averages. So how can a supervisor best deal with these situations?

While the term may sound off-putting, “discipline” can be termed more positively as “redirection.” The initial step is to ask if the issue at hand is a result of poor behavior, performance or conformance, in order to determine the appropriate intervention. If performance is the reason for discipline, it is most often a time to discuss training, retraining, or gaining a greater degree of the commitment, engagement or attention from the employee to their work activities. If the problem is related to behavioral matters, some sort of reprimand is appropriate if the bad behavior is intentional. If the behavior is unintentional, such as lack of ability or poor work ethic, retraining is probably the correct intervention. Nonetheless, proper diagnosis of the problem is the first step toward building future success.

The goal of discipline is to call attention to poor situations as an interim step in correcting them. Some might argue that discipline can be completed inside of the employee performance management process, but the circumstances and facts of performance management and discipline are different enough to warrant an entirely different process.

The situation that warrants discipline often happens in a different time and space from normal performance management activities. Indeed, an event might present itself, be dealt with, and go away between formal performance management cycles. Events might be too specific or unique. Still there is likely not a scale, description, or procedure fitting the actual problem listed on the typical performance management instrument. With discipline one must be specific about what is wrong, why it is wrong, and what to do about it. The space and specificity are not possible on an instrument designed to summarize a year’s worth of effort.

The best way of responding is usually establishing a performance improvement plan. The supervisor will work with the employee to create a plan to establish clear expectations and a process to follow-up on what has been agreed upon. Most often the plan is provided in a written letter to the employee in question, with defined elements and defined check-in points to follow-up on the matter.

The plan gives the employee direction and support. It ensures a proper amount of attention is focused on the issues at hand and what to do about them. It is about adjustment and correction, making things right. It focuses on rehabilitation, not merely punishment. Just as it is more cost effective to keep a customer than to look for a new one, the same holds for an employee. So the performance improvement plan helps retention and protects the investment you have already made in developing an employee.

I’d be interested in hearing any success stories about how readers have turned employees around using this approach. (No names please!)