See employees as valuable assets

Davies Ndumiso Sibanda

MANY organisations lose valuable skills and productivity through recklessly managed discipline handling processes that result in loss of human capital, which should not have been lost.

The starting point is to view all employees as important assets of the business, which have to be properly managed through a specialised human capital planned maintenance programme. Planned maintenance principles applied in areas such as production so as to get the best from the plant are also applicable to human capital obviously with appropriate modifications.

Disciplinary action is intended to ensure that a disciplined workforce is available at all times. It can be viewed as asset repair so as to continue getting the best out of people who work for the organisation.

The starting point with discipline is that it should be corrective and punitive action only used as an option of last resort or can be used in the first instance where the misconduct goes to the root of the relationship and trust between the parties will have collapsed.

Where discipline is used as a means of human assets disposal, the decision to dismiss an employee must not be taken lightly. The employer must be satisfied that the human asset cannot be repaired. Some of the things to consider is the experience, quality of work to be lost, investment the organisation had made in the individual employees, a cost of replacement, overall business implications, effects on labour relations, organisation image damage possibility and many others.

I recall an organisation that dismissed their marketing manager over an issue that could have been amicably resolved. Within days he had set a competing business and started taking skills from his former employer and in thirty-six months his business had sunk his former employer as he had taken over most of his former clients.

The moment you throw your “useless” human capital into the rubbish dump and you see your competitors rushing there to collect the “rubbish” you threw away then there is a need to relook at your human capital disposal policy. A simple measure is to follow employees you dismissed, who their new employers are or take stock of other activities done by people you dismissed. In many instances, good quality dismissed employees go on to join other organisations of substance or set up own successful business.

Where employees have not been dismissed, the use of warnings requires careful management. I once worked with an organisation where the chief executive boasted that all his heads of department (HODs) were on final warning thus he was a no-nonsense man. When we did an audit, we found that three quarters of workers had either expired or live warnings. Talking to employees, one could feel the air of fear. Where employees have warnings hanging over their heads or are coming from warnings, which have just expired, productivity is generally low. It is even worse where even HODs have warnings hanging over their heads.

In conclusion, there is a need therefore to use dismissal and warnings in a responsible manner to instill discipline and help improve productivity rather than kill it.

Davies Ndumiso Sibanda can be contacted on: email: [email protected]