After you've investigated a problem or complaint, if you find that action is necessary, you'll need to deal with the employee in question. Prior to disciplining an employee for violating work rules or engaging in other workplace misconduct, ask yourself the following questions.

Generally, you cannot use polygraph testing to screen prospective employees and you cannot use the polygraph, except under certain, narrow circumstances, to test current employees.

Employee monitoring, like surveillance, is a highly complicated and controversial way to gather information for an investigation. Employee monitoring can also invade an employee's privacy, and its legality depends on the reasonableness of both the employee's expectation of privacy and also your monitoring.

Whether a workplace search is legal or not depends in part on the reasonableness of the employee's expectation of privacy and the reasonableness of the employer's surveillance. If you are in doubt about whether you should do a search, consult an attorney.

When a normal investigation, including interviews and statements from employees and other individuals, does not seem to be giving you the information you want, you may consider some alternative information-gathering methods.

If you witness some improper behavior or if one of your employees or customers informs you of inappropriate behavior on the part of one of your employees, you'll need to check it out. While basic fact-finding might seem easy and obvious enough to do, it's important to know what to ask and how to get information.

Once you become aware of a problem with an employee or receive a complaint from another worker or a customer, you need to investigate the situation before you take any action. You need to be sure that you have all the facts and that you understand what went on, as much as possible. In order to be most effective, you need to know

Whatever the type of dispute or complaint resolution procedure - either an informal procedure or a case-by-case approach - it should:

An alternative to having a traditional complaint procedure is to address complaints as they arise. This may be an effective approach for a business with only one or two employees.

As a small business, you probably don't want to spend the time and resources or have the need to develop an involved procedure for dealing with employee complaints. Instead, you may want to have some general guidelines so that employees know what to do if they have a complaint. A set of basic procedures helps you make sure that you treat all complaints in a consistent manner.

If you have employees, it is likely that you will have to deal with an employee complaint. If an employee complains about an employment-related situation, you should be prepared to handle it in a fair and consistent manner.

While progressive discipline is designed to address the problem of employees who break work rules, it is not very effective when dealing with an employee who doesn't violate any rules, but is incompetent or is not performing work to an acceptable level.

If you decide to implement a progressive discipline policy, you will need to formulate a written policy, even if you do not give it to the employees (and we recommend that you don't).

Progressive discipline can be an involved process. For very small businesses, it may be too involved to invest time in, especially if there are few discipline problems. Here are some of the other downsides of progressive discipline:

While a progressive discipline system may seem like a high-maintenance way to control employee behavior, it does have definite advantages. For instance:

In a progressive discipline system, the severity of the penalty increases with each infringement of the rules. Among the advantages of a progressive discipline system is the fact that you can work with the employee to try to retain him or her as a productive worker without having to resort to termination immediately. Typically, the progression is:

An effective, comprehensive, and successful discipline program should contain the following elements:

There will be times when an employee violates a policy or standard of conduct that will require immediate termination. However, in most cases, the problems aren't that serious, or at least they don't start out that way.

In most small businesses, enforcement of rules is done on a casual basis. For example, if someone is spending too much time on the phone taking personal calls, you'd probably just aim a few well-placed hints in his or her direction. If that doesn't work, you might informally take the person aside and explain to them how this affects your business and the person's value as an employee.

How you present your reward and recognition is almost as important as what you recognize and, arguably, more important than what you give as a reward. If in giving the best reward you can afford for a special occasion you simply drop the award off on the employee's desk while mumbling a "thank you" on the way out the door, you've wasted your money and may even have done more harm than good.

If you have any workplace rules or policies, there's a good chance that sooner or later they will be broken by one of your employees and that you may have to enforce those rules with some form of discipline.

Everybody likes to have his or her achievements recognized by others. Even though personal satisfaction will come from meeting a predetermined goal, it is always more meaningful if someone else is there to share the success.

There are no hard and fast rules about when or what types of occasions merit special recognition. Some of the more common reasons for recognition and reward are:

Typical rewards given in conjunction with employee recognition are:

If you suspect that you may have a problem with low morale because employees are exhibiting symptoms of it or because a survey that you've done of your employees indicates it, you need to determine which aspects of your workplace are creating the dissatisfaction with the job and then remedy them.