Recently I read an article called “Employee Disciplining – What is discipline and how do the managers administer it?” by J.T. Knippen and T.B. Green (PM Magazine vol 8, no 3). This article deals with discipline in the workplace. What it is, why managers need to know how it is used, when it should be used and how to go about using discipline.
My Personal Summary
In many cases employees are unaware that they are behaving incorrectly or performing to an undesirable level and if he does know what he is doing wrong, he may not know why it is wrong. Another category of cause is that the employee feels he cannot reach the performance expectations due to some sort of block like the fact that he has to drop his children off at school and does not have enough time after that to make it to work at the predetermined time. Another reason for an employee to not perform up to expectations is that he/she feels there is no incentive to perform the desired behavior. The correct method of discipline can be summarized in a six-step process listed as follows:
- Describing the undesired behavior to the employee.
- Indicating to the employee why the behavior is undesirable
- Determining antecedents and reinforcers for the undesirable behavior
- Eliminating the cause of the undesirable behavior
- Getting the employee to make a commitment to change the behavior
- Providing positive reinforcement when the desired behavior occurs, and withholding it when it does not.
This article gives tremendous insight into analyzing and tending to discipline issues in the workplace. Management needs to identify these behaviors before they turn into habits and become regularly repeated because the longer a behavior goes untarnished or undealt with, the harder it becomes to change that behavior.