Employee Handbook. Institute consequences for lateness. Disciplining employees: Avoid mistakes that get you into trouble. Documenting employee discipline is as important from a litigation defense perspective, as is counseling the employee in the first place to try to correct or improve job performance. Share | Foster Swift Employment, Labor & Benefits Quarterly Winter 2011. Career Advice. For starters, you won’t be able to rely on this employee to complete his or her part of projects. I was a new manager, and didn’t want to come across as heavy-handed, or worse, as Big Brother. When an employee arrives to work late, that arrival should be recorded by the supervisor on duty. Several years back, I had one such employee. Often, chronic lateness can be resolved informally. The success of any company is the outcome of the efforts that is put down by its team members. Even if you have rules in place, if many of your employees come in late without consequences, you can’t single out one employee for disciplinary action. Your employee handbook is the perfect location for this policy. In these conversations and meetings, the employer or manager would typically counsel the employee in an attempt to eliminate the negative behavior and improve the performance.When the employee continues to perform poorly or perform acts of misconduct, then a disciplinary action needs to be taken. In fact, data from a study on CareerBuilder found that “Nearly one quarter (23 percent) of employees admit to being tardy at least once a month on average, with 15 percent admitting to arriving late at least once a week.” Explained here is the importance of discipline. Employee tardiness is an issue that plagues many businesses. Some employers let the first or second tardy arrivals slide and begin disciplinary action once the employee has established a pattern of being late. Depending on your workplace culture and Federal and state employment laws, you may want to create penalties for employees who show up late to work more than, say, once per month. Discipline in the workplace makes employees and employers well-behaved, improves attitude and performance. Employees are less likely to show up late if they know they have to discuss it with someone. Supervisory training can help to ensure that supervisors know their roles and responsibilities when it comes to documenting lateness and counseling and disciplining employees. Document Employee Discipline: Don’t Wait Until It’s Too Late. #6 Document each instance of tardiness and the reason the employee was late. Just make sure all employees are notified of the changes in any employee tardiness policies before they go into effect. It’s one of life’s unfortunate realities: If you’re a manager, you’re going to have to discipline an employee at some point. As a steward of the company, it is your responsibility to address employee transgressions – be they small, recurring or huge. Another important point to make before providing an example of how to discipline an employee for tardiness is that you must always be fair and consistent when applying disciplinary action. 2) What is the common practice? You will have no basis for disciplinary action if the employee did not receive notice of the attendance policy in the first place. Sample Memo for Late coming, indiscipline to employees Time and discipline are the two important factors which drives a company. Most of us cringe when we hear the words “micro-manager,” but sometimes it’s a necessary evil, and managing a constantly tardy employee is one of them. Any employee who is tardy more than three times in any six month rolling calendar period of time will be subject to disciplinary action. 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