Employees are human, and it’s human to err. While some errors can be corrected and rectified, there are others which are critical to business performance. These mistakes can get employers on their nerves, the business could be liable to face consequences for the mistakes made by a taskforce.
Allowing mistakes at work sometimes with a humanly consideration, helps employees to learn through experience, step out of their comfort zones and grow. Also, allowing room for trial-and-error in an organisation would help creative talent to be innovative, and brainstorm on ideas supporting business goals. These trial-and-error considerations allows employees to learn, perform better to avoid mistakes, keep an eye for detail and become great problem solvers.
However, sometimes mistakes that happen due to carelessness, personality traits and overconfidence should be addressed immediately by senior team leaders. This will help avoid further consequences of error to be percolated into the system and the impact being felt by other workforces at large.
See also: How to Deliver Constructive Criticism to Your Employees?
If left unattended, employees tend to repeat errors, and this not just costs businesses, but also impacts the company’s overall performance, employer brand and quality of work delivered. Employers and HR managers must reprimand such employees tactfully, before situations get out of control.
However, reprimanding employees without a careful strategy could significantly decrease employee morale, dampen their confidence levels, or even hamper their self-development goals and the drive to initiate ideas.
The consequences of wrongly reprimanding employees can be felt both by the employer and the employee. Reprimanding employees by initiating a personal attack mode, emotionally snapping, sudden suspension or termination of an employee could end up in creating havoc situations at work. Thus resulting in creation of a toxic workplace where employees feel insecure and threatened by an overtly-decisive management.
Here are some effective ways to reprimand employees without raising a conflict:
1. Immediate actions
It is not always easy to reprimand employees, as negative feedback often leads to tension and disappointment. However, without senior management intervention the employees will tend to repeat the mistakes, time and again in the future.
Without clear communication, employees will not feel the need to make change and would be unwilling to revise the performance at work.
HR managers and employers should necessitate immediate actions to reprimand the employees dealing with guilt, soon after the errors are noticed. Providing immediate feedback on their performance at work will make them more disciplined and leave a deeper impact on their resolve to inflict on their performance and work towards perfection.
Some employers tend to follow the emotional approach when reprimanding guilty employees. Rather than being specific, they tend to expand the reprimanding action to focus on their previous mistakes and outcomes delivered. Such action will not bring any significant change in employee behaviour. On the contrary, employees will feel attacked and lose hopes to improve on their performance.
Conversely, discussing only specific errors and mistakes will make it easy for employees to accept them and work towards fixing the repetitive errors in future.
Employers should stick onto a clear-cut agenda and discuss only specific matters, by keeping the communication crisp and concise – on what is expected of the employees and what is not expected or appreciated in their workings.
Offering help is important to aid employees’ fix errors and mistakes at work. Intensive training, mentoring and supervision from senior management should help them change and perform better at work.
One-on-one consultation with the HR managers and their support could help employees overcome the psychological and bad behavioural attitude at work.
Employers should not only reprimand employees for their mistakes, but they should also appreciate and compliment employees for the good job done. Fair treatment towards all employees and a supportive workplace environment, wherein performance is measured objectively will motivate employees to perform better in their jobs.
Only when employees feel a sense of ownership in their job roles, do they step up to embrace change in their workings and support business endeavours.
Next read: How to Train Employees to be Accountable for Their Actions
