Leadership

Is Progressive Discipline Useless?

By Jessica Stillman

Updated on: March 5, 2009 / 4:20 AM EST / MoneyWatch

The Find: Rather than going through the lengthy process of progressive discipline with an underachieving employee, better to simply fire those not meeting expectations straight away, argues ones HR pro.
The Source: The very opinionated Punk Rock HR blog.

The Takeaway: You have an employee who's not meeting expectations, what's your first step? Most likely, it's a meeting with HR to get the ball rolling on your company's progressive discipline process. The employee will be told of their failings and helped to get up to snuff. If they fail, eventually you fire them. Sounds reasonable enough, so what's Punk Rock HR's Laurie Ruettimann's problem with he process? She starts out by asserting:

I don't buy into the notion of progressive discipline at work. You can either do the job or you can't -- and if you fail to succeed at your job when most of your co-workers are succeeding, the job is not for you. It's time to start fresh.

Instead she recommends simply firing failing employees straight off â€" with a healthy severance. Why? Not because it's best for the employee (though maybe it is), but because it'll teach the company to be more careful about whom they hire:

When we have an employee who honestly fails, we bear some of the responsibility -- and we owe this employee something for his wasted efforts. Give him severance, allow him to claim unemployment, and offer him some kind of discounted medical plan for six months to offset his COBRA expenses. Ask him to sign a release & waiver and be done with the mess. Let the employee get on with his life, and free your managers from the mess of coaching an employee who is destined to fail
Ethics and value don't change behaviors. Money drives change. If we had to pay our former employees real money when they walk out the door, we would learn from our mistakes and do a better job hiring them in the first place.

The Question: Do you agree with Ruettimann's assumption that most failing employees don't change (or, at least, not enough to warrant spending time and money on them)?

(Image of The Office severance package by doobybrain, CC 2.0)