Dealing with accident prone employee.

dburns75 · April 2006

Second post in as many days. Just wanted to see if anyone has had this sit before and how you handled. We have an employee who has had 4 recordable injuries in his first year of employment. All but one have been the result of the employee not paying attention and just being careless. We strongly believe we need to remove this employee from our workplace. Comments and suggestions welcome.

Irie · April 2006

If you remove this employee it could be seen as retaliation on your part. My suggestion is to progressively discipline the employee in accordance with your written safety policies.

dburns75 · April 2006

Thanks for the quick response. This is what I am advising the Plant Manager also, but he is strongly pushing just terminating him.

Balloonman1 · April 2006

What did you do the first three times? Was he written up for unsafe behavior? If so term him. If not, tread cautiously. Remember the outcome of an accident is chance, could be a scratch, could be 7 stiches and recordable. It is the action, the behavior not the outcome that you need to focus on.

If you do that, consistently, you can fire quite easily repeaters.

My $0.02 worth,
Balloonman

dburns75 · April 2006

Thanks and those are my feelings exactly. In this case the supervisor did not write up for unsafe behavior for first three, so my feeling is we are on very shakey ground with termination.

Whirlwind · April 2006

You might need to write that supervisor up for not writing people up. x:-)

Seriously, isn't this one of the most chronic frustrations for those of us in HR? Supervisors want to shirk their duty to document problem behaviors and performance issues time after time; then, when they've finally reached their limit, they expect to be able to fire someone with no risk of adverse consequences and have us make it magically okay.

Open1 · April 2006

Ditto to Whirlwind!

HRinNH · April 2006

Yes! That's probably THE most frustrating thing I deal with in my office. No one wants to be the bad guy by putting a written warning in an employee's file. I do it myself whenever I know about a situation but since they have learned this, I'm sometimes the last to know that there's a problem.

WT · April 2006

Whirlwind Are my supervisors moonlighting for you or what?

Explain to the supervisor that he and the company must now suffer the consequences of his inaction.

Balloonman1 · April 2006

Yes! Tell them, sorry you do not get to fire him. Oh, btw, here is a little written notice to you about not writting up unsafe behavior.

My $0.02 worth,
Balloonman

Rockie · April 2006

This would be a classic textbook case of Workers Comp retaliation and he would probably receive mega bucks from your company!

An employee who has had this many accidents in a short time probably knows the system and has worked it before....so they are just praying that you will go ahead and fire them.

Discipline for not following proper safety measures is the only recourse unless you are prepared to go to court.

System · April 2006

Welcome to the Forum, dburns.

Instead of waiting for another accident, have him undergo some serious safety training, whether it's a formal course or just the boss showing him what he'd teach a new hire. And make it boring so he'll know you're serious. x}>

James Sokolowski
HRhero.com