Taking a while to get started up today. Discussing fair treatment.
If you don’t treat your employees fairly, you’re likely to end up with a union, and you’ll generally have lower productivity and morale.
Discipline is a form of training. Good disciplinary systems have many common characteristics.
- Rules and Regulations — Need to be universal.
- Progressive Penalties — As rule violations continue, penalties get increasingly worse
- Appeals Process
- Guaranteed Fair Treatment
- Oral warning is usually first in the progression
- Then a written warning
- Unpaid leave — One or more days of not coming to work and not getting paid
- Paid Decision-Making Leave — New concept, send the employee home for a day or two with pay and require them to decide whether they want to keep working at company when they return. Most will decide they do not wish to. This allows you to avoid firing people; most will fire themselves.
- Dismissal — Firing. Various justifications are reasonable for discharge, and will be upheld by arbiters.
- Unsatisfactory Performance — Employee’s offense is not rule-breaking per se, but simply poor performance. Legitimate reason for discharge
- Misconduct. General bad behavior. Rule breaking.
- Insubordination. Refusal to follow directions.
- Lack of Qualifications
Employment at Will means that the employer has no obligation to keep you employed, and you have no obligation to work there. This is overridden by a legal contract to keep working or to keep employing someone. While it is nominally balanced, in practice At Will employment is a benefit to employers, not employees. Employees cannot be prevented from quitting; that would violate anti-slavery laws.
Wrongful Discharge is the offense of firing someone without proper justification. To avoid wrongful discharge suits, there are two basic guidelines.
- Follow your employment policies and procedures. Being arbitrary is dangerous.
- Avoid making legal promises to employees. No “You’ll have a job here for as long as you want it”, or anything of that sort.