Staff has long service but has a record of out bursts verbally towards other staff and managers, has being dealt with on all occasions under our disciplinary process but always seems to come to the end of his warning period before another occurence, recent incident were he has being given a task within his capability which he has done before and suddenly he has back pain and needs to go home, ask to complete the accident book he refuses starts to get abusive verbally and leaves.
I need to know how far I can go with him this time without just issuing a warning, waiting a period and it happening again.
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Hi
The answer may well lie within your companys own D&G policy, however, if indeed the person was abusive i would personnaly think that this is gross misconduct , and dismiss.
Cheers
In most company handbooks abusive language can ammount to gross misconduct. Please check your handbook or contract of employment to see if there is anything in there in regards to that. That might be a stepping stone.
Hi,
I would suggest that you need to speak to the individual about his pattern of behaviour going back over the years and his failure to show consistent improved behaviour. Based on his response to this I would consider taking him to final written warning stage if your policy allows you to jump to whichever stage you deem reasonable. I would personally advise his manager to put him on a personal improvement plan, encouraging the manager to identify exactly what the employee needs to improve on, support they will be given and then to give consistent, honest feedback on his progress. At that point if there has been no improvement he could be escalated through the disciplnary process and you will be able to look him in the eye and know you did what you could to help keep him in his job...the rest was up to him! Plus and of course extremely importantly you have reduced the risk to the company yet still achieved the aim of removing somebody who is underperforming. Having said that, given his history it does seem likely that he will improve in the short term so his improvement plan should last as long as the warning (I'm guessing that will be 12 months for a final written warning). There are different ways to handle every situation but that's what I'd do! ps Although its very tempting to assume that his back pain may not be entirely genuine, I have learnt from bitter experience not to jump to conclusions, to slow down a little bit and discuss this with the individual with an open mind. I hope that I'm not stating the obvious too much, I just want to include everything in case it is of use to you.
Regards,
Sarah