When I was working at my first full-time job after graduating from university, my editor was fired without warning.

The action took us both completely by surprise. He had never had any indication that his performance was less than satisfactory. Looking back, it’s unfortunate that his supervisor never tried using progressive discipline to rectify the situation. It would have saved a lot of grief for everyone involved, as I was left trying to manage without him and he was left without a way to support his family.

I had another similar experience when I was a summer student during my university years. I worked as an assistant to a secretary at a large company, and at the end of the summer, each student had a performance appraisal. I was extremely embarrassed to receive a poor review. What I found most shocking about this was that throughout the four months that I worked there, no one ever told me that I wasn’t doing a good job. As a result, I never had a chance to correct what I was doing wrong as I had no idea that I wasn’t meeting expectations.

A progressive discipline policy would have helped both me and the company – saving me from embarrassment and the company from paying for substandard work.

Progressive discipline is about helping employees achieve success.

As noted in the introduction to Velsoft’s Progressive Discipline courseware: This one-day course will look at the importance of minimizing discipline issues before they happen and the need to have a discipline policy in place. After determining what discipline is and what are appropriate levels of discipline, the course will explain the typical steps of progressive discipline and how to use it to manage employee behavior and performance.

When employees aren’t doing their jobs correctly or are causing problems for others, it’s a productivity and morale buster. It’s also costly for an organization to terminate an employee and then hire a replacement and train them. It’s much more cost effective to make sure current employees are performing and behaving as expected, and using progressive discipline is the best way to achieve this.

Check out Velsoft’s Progressive Discipline course here.