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email: info@labourpro.com
The new era in disciplinary management
LabourPro® is a fast becoming the new standard for handling misconduct in the work place and represents a paradigm shift in disciplinary management...
A shift in focus
Each time an employee committed an offence, managers would have to spend a lot of their time making sure that the correct procedures were being followed and that the employee was being treated in a manner that was consistent with the treatment of other employees.
LabourPro® has changed this by automating these time consuming activities, allowing you to focus more on the circumstances surrounding each offence; making the process more about employment justice and correcting the employee's behaviour.
Corrective action
The emphasis of LabourPro® is towards correcting the employee’s behaviour. It is both costly and time consuming to train staff, so simply dismissing all the time only creates a cycle of expense. Employees will cross the line from time to time and it is our duty to guide them back to the right path. This process is called corrective action and it is not only cost effective strategy, but it is a requirement of the Labour Relations Act. To this end, when an employee breaks a rule, a warning is issued to express dissatisfaction, and to attempt to convince him to change his behaviour.
LabourPro® has designed this process to be time efficient, but more importantly, to be both inclusive and constructive, so that a positive employer/employee relationship can be maintained.
By the same token, the efficiency of this software makes dismissal a very swift process for the employee who continues to misbehave, before he can cause too much damage to your organisation.
How LabourPro® works
The Code of Conduct
LabourPro® ships with a generic Code of Conduct that can be customized to reflect the rules that apply in your organization. Each offence is graded according to its severity and LabourPro® uses these standards to determine how future misconduct will be processed, ensuring consistency for all employees.
Warnings like invoices
Once your code of conduct has been finalised, issuing a warning is similar to generating an invoice:
Select the employee Select the offence Fill in the offence details Print the warning
The LabourLOGIC™ processor considers the severity of the offence, as well as the employee's offence history, to automatically assign the correct sanction and generate the appropriate documentation with all the details filled in.
Substantive issues
Labour Law not only requires you to follow the correct procedures and be consistent; it also states that each case should be determined on it's own merits.
To fulfill this requirement LabourPro® makes it mandatory that you capture the employee's statement before assigning any disciplinary action. This gives you the opportunity to evaluate the reasons that the employee may have for breaking the rule. To assist you, a guilt wizard™ has been included to guide you through a series of questions, with each answer triggering an automated response from the system.
Positive reinforcement
Issuing warnings can be an unpleasant experience for both managers and employees alike. To mitigate this effect, counselling has been included as a part of every disciplinary action. Now you can explain to the employee why the rule exists, how it effects the company when the rule is broken, and propose suggestions so that the employee can avoid breaking the rule again in the future. The effect of this is that the employee understands where the company is coming from and that the action is intended to correct his behaviour and not to punish him, thereby ending things on a much more positive note.
To speed up this process we have included auto-counselling™ which allows to select predetermined counselling messages from a list and insert them into the employee's warning. An added benefit of this is that your counselling messages are consistent and delivered in the tone that you intended.
Hearings
Prior to dismissal every employee is entitled to a fair hearing. LabourPro®’s step-by-step process will guide you all the way, from scheduling the hearing, planning your case, and executing the judgement, with all the paperwork printed automatically. By viewing the history of hearings that involved similar cases you will be able to make decisions that are consistent with past sanctions.
The point of a hearing is to determine whether the employee committed an offence, or at least had a valid reason for doing so. It sounds simple, and actually it is.
Sadly, many hearings become overly complicated and time consuming because this principle is not applied. Normally a game of "cat and mouse" ensues, with one side trying to outsmart the other, and dragging the hearing through a myriad of information that has no relevance to the case.
LabourPro®'s case-builder™ keeps you focused on the facts, by giving you a platform to enter information about the evidence that you would like to show, and witnesses that you want to question. This can then be printed and used to present your case in a clear and concise manner that at the hearing.
The CCMA
Every employee has the right to go to the CCMA and claim that a dismissal was unfair. In order to dispute this claim the CCMA wants you to show that that the employee was given a chance to correct his actions, was treated fairly, and was treated the same as the other employees in the organisation.
The professional documentation that is generated for each disciplinary action will demonstrate that corrective action took place. The fact that the employees statement was always taken will show that you always considered the employee's side of the story. And the fact that you are using LabourPro® will prove that all employees were treated the way the same, because the same rules would apply to everybody.
While you cannot stop employees from taking you to the CCMA, if they realise that they are not likely to win, they will be more reluctant to do so, saving you many hours of wasted time.
Disciplinary management
Apart from processing misconduct, LabourPro® is also a management tool that will allow you to analyse the disciplinary status of your company in a way that has never been possible before.
Reports will show you the most transgressed offences over any given period or cyclic trends that are prevalent in your organisation. Management intervention can therefore be applied to the areas that are of greatest concern, before they get out of hand. Instead of relying on intuition you will have facts to support your decision making. Furthermore, you will be able to track the effectiveness of any management intervention by analysing the data in subsequent months.
Fairness above all
The fundamental quality of LabourPro®, is that it is fair. Employees are protected from arbitrary dismissal because certain procedures have to be followed before a dismissal can occur. The company on the other hand can insist on its right and entitlement to satisfactory conduct and work performance from it's employees.
