Disciplinary procedures: managing the risk

Employee misconduct and disciplinary procedures

This guidance aims to provide you with a framework to manage misconduct following a disciplinary procedure. Unfortunately, when you take action against someone, you can never guarantee that it will not result in a claim, however, we hope that this guidance will help to reduce the risk of that.

This guidance is intended as a summary of the issues that may need to be considered and is not intended to be a detailed analysis of the law in this area.

If you have your own internal disciplinary procedure then it is important that you follow your own procedure (particularly if it is contractual) as failure to do so could mean the dismissal is unfair and, in some cases, in breach of contract.

Our disciplinary toolkit provides you with a framework to manage misconduct and helps you to reduce the risk of claims being made against your business.

This toolkit contains:

• A summary of the law relating to fair dismissal and misconduct dismissal
• 10 pages of guidance on the disciplinary procedures to be followed
• Templates of all of the letters and meeting plans that you would need throughout the disciplinary process

This will allow you to build your company’s standardised process from start to finish.