Employee Discipline Impact On Workplace Culture

Key Takeaways:

1. Employee discipline establishes how your employees work with each other and external stakeholders.

2. How to define discipline-related policies and processes and make them part of your onboarding process.

3. Best practices for implementing employee discipline policies and ensuring that everyone follows them for maximum benefit.

What Is Employee Discipline? How It Impacts Workplace Culture

What is the definition of a productive workplace? One where people work well together, towards a common goal, and meet stakeholders’ needs. However, to ensure that a company and all its employees work cohesively, there needs to be a well-defined strategy, workplace processes, and employee discipline. 

Workplace employee discipline is about ensuring fair and equitable treatment of all employees, maintaining professional behavior, and projecting a cohesive image to the world. For employee discipline to work well, it is critical to make it relevant, keep it up to date, and ensure an impartial process. 

Only when discipline is implemented fairly and equitably can company culture evaluation metrics be measured. The Great Place to Work® team works with its customers to ensure that factors such as discipline, understanding of core values, and overall performance are on point through culture consulting services. 

This blog will explore the definition of employee discipline, its impact on workplace culture, common reasons for discipline, types of disciplinary action, and steps for implementing it.

What Does Employee Discipline Mean?

Employee discipline is the set of rules and processes that organizations adopt to address employee misbehavior. Employee discipline includes monitoring and correcting behavior, enforcing a code of conduct, monitoring performance, and addressing ethical and legal violations.

The employee discipline manual or set of rules will include processes, policies, and steps for addressing any disciplinary issue. 

Some typical situations where employee discipline may be needed are:

• A shift employee repeatedly disregards timings 

• Unplanned absenteeism without any communication

• Inability to meet task timelines set and agreed upon

• Not meeting performance metrics consistently

• Behavioral issues and other forms of misconduct

Acts of violence, malice, or any form of harassment 

As a rule, the organization will have set processes for each of these issues and will take measures to inform, discuss, take corrective action, and record the information. Employee discipline is seen as a means of improving working conditions rather than as punishment.

How Does Employee Discipline Help Improve Workplace Culture?

Employee discipline enables people from varying backgrounds and with different functions to work better toward a common goal. It ensures that people are aware of the acceptable standards, are held accountable, and behave in an appropriate manner. This, in turn, will boost morale, improve productivity, and uphold the company’s image with internal and external stakeholders. 

Here’s what employee discipline helps organizations achieve:

#1 Establish and maintain standards

When a diverse team of employees works together in an organization, there can be confusion about the standards they are expected to uphold. Often, when a person joins an organization, they are either a fresher who has never worked before or someone joining from another company. In both cases, they must be educated on the current company’s standards so they can align with the expectations. Establishing employee discipline policies helps everyone be on the same page.

#2 Enables fair treatment consistently

Whether a customer, supplier, shareholder, or colleague, it is important that they are treated fairly. Creating and sharing employee behavior guidelines will ensure fair treatment at all levels. For instance, the process for new vendor onboarding should be transparent. This helps ensure that your vendors or suppliers are treated fairly.

#3 Upholds the company’s reputation

When a business is known for being transparent, equitable, and ethical in its dealings with internal and external stakeholders, it builds a positive reputation in the market, among its peers, future employees, suppliers, and shareholders. A company known for fairness, attracts quality suppliers, best talent, good financing terms, and much more.

#4 Helps establish accountability 

As an organization grows, authority is delegated to people leading teams and departments, which helps them function more effectively. However, this authority must be tempered by accountability to ensure fairness across the board, and employee discipline policies help ensure accountability. Furthermore, having a clear, well-established set of rules and processes for employee discipline helps improve transparency in the workplace.

What Are Some of the Common Reasons Requiring Employee Discipline?

When people discuss employee discipline, they often think of misconduct or poor attitudes among employees. While these are among the leading reasons, there may also be factors such as a lack of understanding of policies, cultural dissonance, or simple miscommunication. 

Here are some common reasons why a company needs to focus on employee discipline:

• Foster better time management: Encouraging people to be punctual, meet deadlines, and complete projects can help everyone work cohesively.

• Encourage attendance and planned leaves: Ensure that employees find it easy to stick to login and logout timings. In some cases, it will prevent absenteeism with unplanned leaves.

• Improve work performance: In teams where numbers matter, such as sales, disciplinary action can help employees get the resources needed to meet targets.

• Ensuring proper conduct: With the right set of rules, employees behave well with their  colleagues and follow instructions from their team lead.

• To help follow company policies: Ensures that employees are aware of company policy, and avoid any situation where there could be a breach.

• Implement a proper code of conduct: Makes employees aware of local laws and helps them avoid any action that is not legal, acceptable, or unethical.

• Educate and propagate equality:  Helps employees be aware of rules (when they are new to the company/country). In this case, educational and constructive employee discipline would be the best option.

What are the different types of employee discipline?

When one hears the term ‘employee discipline’, it is assumed that it is punitive or negative. However, that is not always the case; employee discipline can be positive and constructive, with constructive feedback given, and people coached to improve in those areas.

Here’s a table that details different types of employee discipline:

Type of employee discipline	Definition	What does it entail?
General discipline	This discipline aims to have an ongoing process for implementing disciplinary measures, updating employees, and educating them through various means.	A detailed session while onboarding new employees Creating and sharing discipline-related handouts Regular training sessions and workshops
Constructive discipline	The focus of this type of discipline is to help the employee identify areas for improvement and guide them on ways to improve.	Guidance and counseling to learn and improve Useful feedback with tips to improve Training and education on improvement areas
Gradual discipline	This discipline level will follow a stage-wise process where the actions will follow an increasingly stringent trajectory unless the employee shows measurable improvement.	It starts with an informal or spoken warning Followed by an email warning, which will become part of the employee records Then, putting the employee in a performance improvement program or under the guidance of a mentor Parting of ways if the discipline does not yield results
Punitive discipline	This aspect is only applicable when there is gross misconduct, legal or ethical violations. Harassment, piracy, insider trading, theft, etc., fall under this category.	Quick and effective investigations are conducted to learn about the level of violation, often by third parties The employee is brought in, questioned, and disciplinary action is taken. There is a debrief session, the matter is closed, and a neutral communication is sent to the stakeholders.

What Are the Steps to Implement an Effective Employee Discipline Process?

The key to implementing effective, fair, and relevant employee discipline involves a series of steps to ensure understanding, acceptability, and usage by employees.

Steps to implement an employee discipline process:

Step 1: Understand what is required

Understand what is required by studying the employee demographics, different roles, current best practices, and company-specific requirements. 

For example:  

• If the company has the majority of employees working in a hybrid setting, then the number of hours, deliverables, and mandatory office working hours must be considered. 

• If it is a factory setting with workers working in shifts, then in time, out time, and output during the shift must be fixed. 

• A mandatory formal dress code is essential when most of the teams are customer-facing. 

• Data protection discipline becomes crucial when the business involves handling private customer information, such as in healthcare or banking services.

• Meeting attendance becomes important when young interns and trainees work on projects.

These are some examples of factors to consider when designing employee discipline policies.

Step 2: Create a simple, methodical, and clear set of policies

Once the requirements are clear, it is time to put together the policies that will govern the company and empower different teams to work well together to produce the best results. Clearly define which policies should be made widely available and create learning modules with access controls.

Step 3: Gamify, educate, and communicate

Once the employee discipline policies are ready, disseminate the information. This can be achieved by creating policy documents, gamifying content for easy consumption, and sharing them with employees as required. For instance, new employees must have access to basic policies, and existing employees must be educated about updated policies. Gamification makes it easier to consume information and test whether employees remember the details. Provide clear methods for reporting any issues related to discipline that allow the person raising the complaint to receive complete protection.

Step 4: Implement and take action

Once these steps are complete, it is time to define how any employee disciplinary matters that arise will be handled.

1. After identifying the disciplinary issue, investigate the matter completely. If possible, talk to others in the team and ensure that all the details are collected.
   
2. Start by documenting the issue, including the issue description, details such as the date and activity trail, any previous warnings, and the actions taken to date.
   
3. Include the department head, reporting manager, Human Resources (HR) representative, and legal and finance teams, if required, for a candid discussion.
   
4. Once the discussion is over, agree on the course of action, such as training, improvement programs, or other actions.
   
5. If the matter is not closed at this level, and depending on the disciplinary action taken, monitor the disciplined person’s progress with prescribed actions.

What Are the Best Practices to Implement an Employee Discipline Program?

• Consistency is key when taking disciplinary action

• Do not let personal biases interfere with discipline

• Document every part of the process for reference

• Use discipline as an overall  learning opportunity

• Empower managers to implement discipline

Here’s the Best Way to Leverage an Employee Benefit Program

Employee discipline is key to ensuring a smoothly run, productive, and reputable organization. However, it is also essential that the company’s employee discipline program is based on relevant requirements, aligns with peer companies, and is accepted by employees. This is where the Great Place to Work model will help.

Whether it is learning the pulse of the market, understanding what employees think, or culture consulting, the expert team at Great Place to Work can help.

Want to know how we can help? Click here to connect with us.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does employee discipline mean implementing strict rules and penalties?

No, employee discipline is not only about strict rules and penalties. Employee discipline includes policies that help employees become better at their jobs, increase productivity, learn to perform better as a team, and protect their interests.

Do smaller companies need to implement employee discipline?

Companies of all sizes, including smaller businesses, can benefit from employee discipline by ensuring smoother operations, higher productivity, compliance with local laws, protection against lawsuits, and a good reputation among internal and external stakeholders.

What are the different forms of employee discipline?

There are many categories under employee discipline, but we can broadly divide them into four categories: 1. General discipline, 2. Constructive discipline, 3. Gradual discipline, and 4. Punitive discipline. 

How should a company determine which form of discipline to use?

The discipline type will depend on the situation. General discipline is informative. Constructive discipline  evaluates employee performance and takes corrective action. Gradual discipline looks at below par performers and administers a performance improvement program. Punitive discipline is about corrective action when there is a breach of company policies, harassment, or any illegal or unethical activity.

What is the difference between Gradual and Punitive discipline?

Gradual discipline is administered to people with performance issues, while punitive discipline is applied in cases where there is an ethical, moral, or legal breach.