Consider this first before you even think about instituting disciplinary action
At the end of November last year, Ivan Israelstam, CEO of Labour Law Management Consulting, published a general article about the procedures you must follow before you even THINK of dismissing an employee.
Frew Murdoch, HR Pulse’s assistant editor, attended Global Business Solutions’ 1-day workshop on 4 December to learn about the intricacies of dismissing an employee. She came back with MOUNTAINS of information of the subject. With this in mind, I’ll be writing a series of articles on disciplining your employees.
I’ll be covering:
- The first steps you must follow when you notice incorrect behaviour among your employees;
- What is ‘fair reason’?
- What is ‘fair procedure’?
- How to discipline specific offences;
- How do you draft different types of documentation properly?
- What type of witnesses is your employee allowed to have at an enquiry?
What do you do first when an employee ‘slips up’?
When it comes to your attention that one of your employees has ‘slipped up’ or done something wrong, according to your company’s policies and procedures, thoroughly investigate the incident first. Collect documentary evidence, verbal evidence (from, e.g. witnesses) and related information (from policies) to allow you to understand what actually happened so that you can classify the incident.
Why must you classify the incident?
According to Jonathan Jones from Global Business Solutions, who facilitated the workshop, you must classify the incident to find out if it falls into the misconduct, incapacity or operational requirements categories. If the incident falls into one of these three categories, you can dismiss the employee who was responsible for that incident. (But remember that the dismissal must be fair, otherwise you could be facing the CCMA.)
It is vital to classify which category the incident falls into because you need to consider different issues depending on this. And if you don’t classify the incident properly, and you proceed with dismissing the employee based on incorrect reasons, the dismissal will be unfair and can be challenged. (Read our article by Gavin Stansfield from Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr about how the CCMA will now deal with dismissal cases.)
In the next instalment of this series, I’m going to delve deeper into dismissal for misconduct and the five questions you must ask yourself before you start proceedings to dismiss an employee for misconduct.
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Lia Marus is the editor of HR Pulse. She has a BA in French, Italian and Linguistics from UCT, an MA in translation from Wits and a Postgraduate Diploma in Management from the Wits Business School. She is currently studying towards her LLB through Unisa. Lia started her career off in corporate communications, where she worked as a sub-editor, researcher and marketing coordinator. She then heeded the call of the publishing world and went into the business-to-business publishing field. She worked as a sub-editor as well as a chief sub-editor. Before joining ITWeb, she managed an HR guidebook at a leading international publishing company. |
