A Business Owner’s Guide To Dealing With Employee Disputes

All business owners will have to face the possibility of employee disputes at some point. It is essential that you know how to deal with them properly to ensure you don’t get anything wrong. Mistakes on your part could cost you dearly in the person concerned decides to take you to a tribunal. With that in mind, we’ve created a guide that gives you a step by step process to follow. So long as you don’t overlook any of the information below, you should be in the perfect position to get things right. Let’s get down to it.

Design your disciplinary process

It is important that you follow a standard disciplinary process with all employees. That is the only way to ensure you don’t affect employee morale when dealing with disputes. The law states you can’t simply sack them on the spot for minor misdemeanors. Ideally, you should provide them with a verbal warning, and then two written warnings. You can then move onto assessment meetings if the situation does not improve. Presuming your worker doesn’t follow the guidelines you set out, the final solution is to terminate their employment.

Create an employee manual

Before you do anything else, it makes sense to create an employee manual. That document should explain what you expect to see from your workers. It should let them know how you expect them to act, and it should also highlight the disciplinary process. So long as you hand that file to every member of your team, they should have no excuse for not following the rules.

Hold weekly meetings to discuss issues

It’s preferable to avoid the disciplinary process if that is possible. To limit the chances of you having to hand out warnings, you should consider holding weekly meetings. Presuming there is an issue you need to discuss, highlighting it to your team is sensible. It is likely they will take heed and make whatever changes you require.

Seek legal assistance

Sometimes business owners are left with little choice but to sack their employee. When that happens, you need to seek legal advice. That is especially the case if you think the worker will try to take you to court. Employment law is a complicated subject, and so you need the best experts on your side. Just search online or ask other company bosses in your local area for recommendations. While the legal help will cost you money, at least it should stop you from getting a bad reputation. Ideally, you want to be known as a responsible and fair employer.

Dru Kelly

As you should now understand, it is critical that you deal with employee disputes in the right way. Those of you who are confused about the process should probably seek legal help a little sooner than others. The last thing you need is to make mistakes and have to pay out lots of compensation unjustly. You need that money to help fund growth and expansion in your business.

We hope this post has been of some use, and that you now feel more confident about handling troublesome employees. There are lots more articles on this website that could come in handy. Make sure you do some more reading before you leave us today.