Have You Covered Your Bases? Complimentary C&D Process
You are here:We spend a lot of our time helping employers extract themselves from difficult situations arising around employee counselling and discipline. This is a great source of new business for us, but not what we would prefer to spend our time doing, because inevitably, its not productive for our client. In this article, we talk about some of the procedural steps involved in dealing with difficult or non-performing employees and provide you with access to a free template 'Disciplinary Record' form which you can adopt as your own.
Following a Fair Procedure
Most employees in Australia are entitled to pursue an unfair dismissal case under the Federal Workplace Relations Act - although there are numerous exceptions to this, including employees with less than 6 months of service (12 months if a casual), employees terminated for 'operational reasons', employees earning in excess of a nominated salary 'cap', employees still covered by the State system, and others. [Editor's Note - a lot of these restrictions will change when Labor brings its new legislation into place as planned in mid-2009]
When they do, the tribunal (the Australian Industrial Relations Commission) can determine whether the dismissal was "harsh, unjust or unreasonable". If it decides the termination was one or more of these, it can seek to put things right by ordering the employer to reinstate the employee together with any lost wages, or alternatively, pay damages of up to 6 months pay.
The Act sets out a number of factors that will be considered by the Commission in exercising its unfair dismissal powers, including whether -
- the employer had a valid reason to terminate the employee;
- the employee was advised of the reason;
- the employee was given an opportunity to respond; and
- any warnings the employee received.
Critical to an employer in defending itself will be whether it can produce viable evidence to convince the Commission about its actions in relation to these listed matters.
This makes record keeping a critical part of dealing with any disciplinary issues that might eventually lead to an employee's dismissal.
Free Disciplinary Interview Record Form
As part of our suite of Online HR Resources Service, we have developed a whole series of critical employment documents that every employer should have. One of these is a Disciplinary Interview Record form, which steps a manager through the process of a disciplinary interview in a way that ensures the listed items on the previous page are addressed and appropriately recorded.
As a taster of what's included in the Online HR Resources Service,we have provided you with free access to a PDF version of our Disciplinary Interview Record. Just click on the link below.
You can also view a selection of other documents available within our Online HR Resources for free via a limited public log-in to the service. Most of these are in Word format to allow you to customise the form to your organisation's particular needs and document style.
Click here to request a free trial log-in.
Click here to download the free Disciplinary Interview Record Form.
