Hi. I'm Candice Elliot, and I am a human resources strategist, and I work with a holistic system of human resources, looking at all of the different parts of your company in order to keep the system with its many parts working together well. Today, I'm going to be talking about corrective action planning, which is kind of another word for discipline but it's a different way of performing discipline in your company. Corrective action planning is a system of providing counseling and information to employees who are performing at a lower standard than you expect, to bring them up to standard so that you can continue working together in a productive way.
It's different from feedback. Throughout training, and ongoing through an employee's time with an organization, it's important to be continually providing them with feedback. Things that they've been doing well, things that they can improve on. Feedback can be really hard to hear, so it can be nice to start off with, “Can I give you some feedback?” rather than just launching into whatever it is. Corrective action is a little different. This is in situations where maybe feedback hasn't worked, or a situation is severe, to not just warrant feedback but to warrant something else.
Let us take an example of someone who never shows up for meetings on time, always 10-minutes-late to meetings, and it's getting to the point where it's affecting your productivity, your business's success, [00:02:00] and it just can't continue. The person's been talked to before, and so you decided that you're going to put together a corrective action plan. This is done with the employee. You start out by filling out the corrective action plan with the incident, what happened, whether it's a first correction, or a final correction, how many chances does this person have moving forward.
With something like lateness to meetings, even consistently over time, I would start with just a normal first correction, a written correction and not a final or last correction. With something that's more severe, for instance, a new restaurant opens up a server no-call no-shows for a shift. They haven't yet talked to their staff about no-call no-shows, and that meaning that they will no longer be working for them anymore. That would be an appropriate situation to do a final corrective action plan. You have the type of plan that it is, you have what happened, you have next steps, your expectations, what do you want the employee to do moving forward?
In the end, you have a follow-up meeting. You schedule a time that's in a week or two weeks to follow up on what's going on. If something is not fixed, that automatically gives you a time to follow up with the next step in the corrective action plan. If you're going to go to increasing levels of severity, or it gives you a good time to check in, see how things are going with a person, see what progress they've made, and then make goals for them moving forward.
That, you do all on your own, and you have this [00:04:00] ready when you meet with the person. You meet with them in private because these are generally sensitive subjects, and it's good to meet with people in private if you can. Of course, having another manager there can be very helpful. I generally say that any meetings like this, corrective action meetings, a termination should be done with two managers present. That way, if there's any kind of disagreement about what happened during the meeting, you have two points of view around what actually transpired.
You meet with a person and you review the actions that they're taking that you would like them to change. You review the type of action that you're requesting from them, the type of behavior you're requesting from them. Then you ask them, “What are you going to do to make sure that this happens?” You write that down on this corrective action plan. You talk about the next steps and when you guys are going to meet again, and then they sign it, and you sign it, and it goes into their file.
The goal of corrective action planning, like I said previously, is to work with the employee to change a behavior so that you can continue to work together moving forward. It is different from a traditional disciplinary system, which is what many companies use, and it can work with a disciplinary system. You can have a section in your handbook that says, “Discipline looks like this” and then in your implementation phase, you can have it actually be corrective action where you're working with the person on [00:06:00] their actions, but you're still providing them with the same types of notices that are listed in your disciplinary plan.
In studies, corrective action has been more successful at changing behavior than traditional discipline because you are inviting the person into the work with you, because you're following up with them, because you're setting goals with them, as opposed to a traditional disciplinary system where you would say, “You're bad. You did this thing. Never do it again. We're both going to sign it and it's going to go in your file.”
If you have things that are going on with your employees that aren't exactly right, and you want to shift that behavior into a different form before you move forward with something like a termination or even you consider something like that, corrective action is a really nice way to go. I will put templates and a template policy in the resources for this lesson, so that you can access those. Thank you.
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