During the employment relationship there may be situations where the informal approach to manage conduct is not appropriate. This may be because the manager has already tried to address the conduct with informal approaches and it hasn’t worked, or because the misconduct is so serious that informal is not the right thing to do.
Every employer should have a disciplinary procedure; there is no such thing as instant dismissal.
Where disciplinary action is taken, the manager must ensure that the disciplinary procedure is applied consistently, and the ACAS Code of Practice is followed – an essential read for every manager and leader, as it contains the steps to be taken. If the Code hasn’t been followed, it can result in an uplift in compensation for the employee in a successful employment tribunal case.
Disciplining an employee should be undertaken in a culture of managing with good intentions. It’s not about setting an example, it’s not to punish someone, it aims to bring about the necessary change in behaviour required.
Today’s disciplinary procedure will often only include two warnings: first written and final written. Verbal warnings are usually written to occur outside of the disciplinary procedure. This makes sense, as a verbal warning being ‘written up’ doesn’t feel like a verbal warning!
Warnings will have an expiry date, and it is still important to disregard spent warnings when considering the outcome of a disciplinary hearing.
In a Transfer of Undertakings Protection of Employment (TUPE), the transferor will provide the transferee with details of any disciplinary warnings in the past two years as part of the exchange of information about employees.
In references, under Safer Recruitment, early years employers should provide details of any substantiated safeguarding allegations that meet the harm threshold. These should also be included in references.
