Documenting Employee Discipline and Corrective
Action
There are two types of corrective action in my
book: verbal and formal...
By
Darin Hanks
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Verbal corrective action is a
conversation between a supervisor and a direct report warning that sustained
improvement in the area of job performance or personal conduct must be
demonstrated in order to prevent formal corrective action or termination of
employment.
Even though this type of counseling is called a
verbal and the employee is not asked to sign any documents related to the
corrective discussion, the counseling should be documented. Supervisors
should make note of the reason for the verbal, the date, time, and location of
the verbal, as well as the employee reaction to the counseling. This information
should be given to the HR Manager to be placed in the employee's personnel file.
It may surprise you that we said to put record of
a verbal in the employee's file. It is common to request that such
discussions be noted in a daily planner or PDA, but in practice, when compiling
supporting information for formal corrective documents, or simply determining a
course of disciplinary action, it is impractical to contact all supervisors that
may have such information noted and then find a way of collecting it. Therefore,
we advise you make it mandatory for all verbals be filed.
(We include a template for documenting verbals with our Progressive
Discipline templates).
Formal corrective action is a plan of
action prescribed by an HR Manager or a
disciplinary review group, fully documented on paper, formally presented to
the "offending" employee for acknowledgement by signature, and placed in the
employee's personnel file. (Our Progressive Discipline
templates offer example plans of action and language for formal corrective
action documents)
For additional training,
consider renting the training video "Employee
Discipline."
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Corrective /
Disciplinary Templates
HRIT offers templates you can use as suggested
above.
Includes Four (4) progressive discipline templates with two sample corrective reviews (One for job performance and one for absenteeism).
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One template used for documenting verbals.
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One template used for formal corrective action:
re: job performance
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One template used for formal corrective action:
re: absenteeism
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One template used for recommending that an employee be
terminated.
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Two sample corrective reviews for style and phrase
examples.
See a list of
all available HR Forms
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