Write-Up Necessities

By: Bill Vogel, PHR
Date: 8/13/2018
VirtualHRPros.com
 
In a recent post I provided an outline that helps managers and supervisors draft write-ups when the need for disciplinary action is necessary.  As a recap, the outline for these five paragraphs are: 1) Brief description of what happened. 2) Explanation provided by the employee and manager’s rebuttal. 3) Impact of the violation on the business. 4) The policy, procedure or rule violated. 5) Consequences for future violations (e.g. future disciplinary warnings up to and including termination from employment).
 
Let’s review the two most challenging paragraphs needed for an effective defensible written warning: 
 

• Paragraph-2
• Paragraph-4

 
Paragraph-2 (Explanation provided by the employee and manager’s rebuttal) ensures that the manager got the employee’s side of the story. This helps defend against claims of unfair treatment and employees escalating a complaint armed with information not uncovered by the manager.  This step is sometimes referred to as due-process. The pitfall here is that this step also opens employees to counter complaints because employees may take the opportunity to submit claims such harassment. In this case, the write-up is not placed in the personnel file until the employee’s claim is investigated, but the employee is still asked to sign the write-up, or a witness signature is obtained, to verify that that the disciplinary meeting took place.

Another challenging requirement is paragraph-4 (The policy, procedure or rule violated), which is necessary because this helps support the manager’s decision to disciple an employee.  Managers usually have all the details of why they want to discipline or terminate an employee, but they must also ask themselves which policy the employee violated. On occasion, a written policy, procedure or rule may not exist for a certain workplace practice, this may mean an audit of the employee handbook is needed.  However, a rule can be anything outside of the employee handbook that may have been overlooked but should be included in the write-up. For example, instructions written on a piece of machinery that the employee failed to follow is essentially a workplace rule.
 
As always, get help from a qualified HR Professional if you think your business is at risk, or needs help developing policies, procedures, and training courses such as issuing coaching and corrective action, to assist with workplace compliance requirements.

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