Giving an outcome to a Discipline or Grievance Process

When you’ve conducted a disciplinary or a grievance process and raised a letter of outcome you then have to consider how you will give the outcome to your employee.

This is an area where I am afraid, some employers forget the importance of the psychological contract.

How we best communicate?

Here’s an example. Employee A has been disciplined for a failure to follow procedures. In the hearing they defended their actions and did not feel that they should be blamed for what happened. The employer has decided that a final written warning is appropriate given the serious nature of the circumstances. Employee A is at work and rather than hand the letter of warning to Employee A, the employer decides to leave it for them in their ‘pigeon hole’. Employee A doesn’t see the envelope for several days.

Now I give this example as and example of the how the decisions made by the employer to communicate the outcome of a disciplinary process impact the psychological contract.

In this example, we are told that Employee A did not accept that they had failed to follow the procedures in the hearing. It can therefore be reasonably assumed that they will not accept that they have been formally warned.

Where an employee has acknowledged the warning is coming in the hearing, how we decide to communicate can be influenced by their behaviour. No need to make more of a thing about the outcome, as they have communicated that they recognise it is coming!

In this example the decision to place the letter of final written warning in someone’s tray has had two negative impacts. 1) It has sat there for days. 2) It has been treated as non verbal communication and destroyed the psychological contract.

In this case the employer had no desire for the employee to leave the business. However that is what they did. They quit on the back of receiving their letter of warning.

I think that if the employer had handled the communication of the letter of outcome differently, there would have been a very different conclusion to this story.

If they had invited Employee A into a quiet room, asked them to take a seat and explained that they had reached a decision on the disciplinary matter and that this letter (already sat there in a sealed envelope) confirmed their decision. They would have controlled the environment and the time that Employee A received the information. Employee A on opening the letter could have received words of reassurance from the employer, if upset, had a quiet space to express this and given an opportunity to reset before returning to work.

If an employee is suspended when you reach your outcome then the posted letter makes sense. If they are in work we recommend adopting the above process.

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