When Good Employees Go Wrong: Create a Program that Corrects Bad Behavior

In an ideal world, all employees would perform and behave perfectly while on the job and there would never be any workplace conflict. Unfortunately, this is not an ideal world and people being the complicated creatures they are may have occasion to misbehave, intentionally or not.

When good employees go wrong, it is the supervisor's and employer's responsibility to identify and correct the work performance or behavior issue. The goal is to help them understand what they are doing wrong and show them how they can rectify the situation.

Communicate Performance Guidelines

It's tough to discipline someone for doing something wrong if you haven't told them how to do it right in the first place. That's why one of the best ways to help yourself and your employees work better is to establish not only a corrective action plan, but to be proactive by developing and communicating a performance management program, too.

A performance management program establishes the initial ground rules and performance guidelines that employees must live up to in order to be successful on the job. By having a two-way discussion with each employee and establishing expectations, you lessen the chance that employees will misunderstand what is expected of them. Plus, you make it easier for employees to perform the job well by clearly agreeing in advance to what outcomes are expected, whether that means arriving at work at a specified time, calling in to report an absence, or completing a project by the assigned due date.

Outlining expectations also provides supervisors with a foundation for evaluating performance when it comes for periodic employee performance evaluations. When employees know what is expected of them, it is easier to perform at this agreed-upon level.

Naturally, there may be times an employee fails to meet your expectations or otherwise violates employment policy. That is when it's important for supervisors to provide guidance based on pre-established company policy in order to help the employee learn and correct their mistakes.

Establish a Corrective Action Plan

While a corrective action or a performance improvement plan is typically thought of as a disciplinary tool, it might be more helpful to look at it as a way to renegotiate the previously established performance guidelines.

It should come as no surprise that the average worker finds it disheartening and even demoralizing to be disciplined for poor performance, so when they hear the term "progressive discipline policy" the connotation is negative. And while words can only go so far in changing the emotional impact, if your real goal is to help your employees be successful and do the job properly, then it is important to look at how to take corrective action. Here are five steps:

• Identify the issue. The most important step is to determine if there is a correctable performance or behavior issue. Does the employee have the skill and the willingness to improve?
• Determine the standard. Once you know what is wrong, you have to be able to communicate what is right. What is or isn't the employee doing? How do you want the employee to alter his behavior?
• Set a timeline. This might be either immediate improvement (as in an attendance issue) or it may be a longer time frame if the employee has to learn how to do something correctly.
• Put it in writing. The only way to formalize the agreement and to make sure everyone involved understands it is to have it in writing.
• Follow up. Not only is it important to set a specific day and time when you will get together to follow up regarding the employee's progress, but as a supervisor you need to routinely follow up on how things are going.

Yes, it's important to discipline employees who misbehave or act inappropriately at work; however, if supervisors behave as role models and mentors rather than disciplinarians they will be in a better position to help good employees correct bad behavior.