Positive Approach to Employee Performance Improvement
by Dick GroteCategories : Performance Improvement, Talent Management , add a comment
Smoothing the Consequences of Miscounduct with Accountability
For seventy-five years, American organizations have used a fairly standardized procedure to handle familiar personnel problems such as absenteeism, poor performance, and other misconduct. This approach, usually called “progressive discipline,” provides for an increasingly serious series of penalties — reprimands, warnings, suspensions without pay — when employees fall out of step with the organization’s expectations. When problems arise, the job of the manager is to find the punishment that fits the crime.
But today, a growing number of companies are moving away from using a criminal-justice mentality for employee performance improvement through corrective action. They are abandoning traditional approaches that focus exclusively on punishment. Instead, they are adopting an approach of accountability - employees with unfavorable performance, conduct or attendance issues are required to take personal responsibility for their choice of behavior.
Discipline and Recognition One immediate difference is that traditional, punishment-based discipline systems ignore the great majority of people who never create disciplinary problems. In a non-punitive, “Discipline Without Punishment” approach, there’s a new step added to the process — a positive contact. Just as the policy is expected to resolve employee problems when they arise, it also makes clear that supervisors are expected to recognize employees when they perform well.
Recognizing good performance is no longer just good advice handed out in a management training class. Now it’s a formal policy requirement, a step of the organization’s overall discipline procedure.
