The case of missing chocolates
You are the floor manager in a chocolate manufacturing unit. You noticed a chocolate foil sticking out of Jack's coat pocket last week as he was leaving work.
Jack doesn't know you observed him putting a box of chocolates in his bag as he rolled the trash cans to the dumpster. When you count up and total inventory at the end of the day, you are short approximately one box of chocolates
Questions:
- What disciplinary action will you take?
Answer: Disciplinary or corrective action is a process of communicating with the employee to improve unacceptable behavior or performance. All employees are expected to meet performance standards and behave appropriately. As per the case, after we have found the incident, Jack seem has a repeatedly dishonest behavior and it has seem to be more serious. At the beginning, we found just a foil sticking out of his pocket last week then today he took a box of the chocolates. So we assume that he has misconduct as a thief. The steps of progressive disciplining may be as following;
- Investigate the misconduct; to ascertain in his misconduct, we check the previous stock reports that have found any missing of chocolates which conformed to Jack's work schedules.
- Find the evidence; gathering the capture of photos from security camera and the inventory stock reports as evidence
- Hearing; to raise the issue and have the initial discussion of his misconduct.
- Justify a verbal warning; to notify Jack that he has been observed and found his misconduct with evidence which may the inventory stock report and the photos from the security camera. Remind him the acceptable standards or rules of the firm and describe him that incident was an unacceptable behavior and what has done seems like a minimal fraction but small impact could leads to the big effect in the future.
- Issuing a warning letter; after a reasonable period of time, there is no improvement, or insufficient improvement, Jack will get a warning letter explaining the reasons for dissatisfaction with his conduct. Ultimately, it may be necessary to indicate Jack that he will be suspended without pay or terminated if there is insufficient improvement in the conduct.
However, the goal of taking discipline action in workplace is to guide the employee to improve performance or correct inappropriate behavior, not to punish the employee. As a general rule, the action should be just enough to get the employee's attention and motivated them to work well at their job.
***** Please use the answer above to answer this below question. Should be almost half-page for each sub-questions.
What do you think would be the positive and negative impacts of this action on-
a. Jack
b. Other employees?
c. The organization?