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Progressive Discipline in New Mexico

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Our New Mexico manager has asked that he be able to use something called progressive discipline when disciplining his subordinates. Can you please explain what this means?

Sure. Progressive discipline is discipline that the employees make for themselves. It allows your employees to choose their own courses of discipline when a policy has been violated, rather than being told what to do. For example, if an employee violates a certain policy, then his teammates will decide how he should be taken care of, not the manager.

Progressive discipline works well if you have a small team. Large companies can use it, as long as the departments are small enough for the employees to care about the results and enforcing policies. When progressive discipline is ineffective, it is usually because the employees simply don’t have enough buy-in with the company to make it worthwhile to spend time developing a discipline schedule for the employees. As such, they don’t have enough stake in seeing the program succeed.

If your manager can prove to you that his division meets the criteria, then he should be able to at least try. There are no state or federal laws governing this form of discipline, so he will largely be able to develop his own system, as long as it is within the general bounds of the labor laws. Most employers simply state that as long as everything is well documented so that it will hold up in court, then the system is legal. This is where your manager will want to closely monitor the progressive discipline.

Make sure your manager understands his duties with the system. Simply because he is allowing his employees to determine the best discipline for employees doesn’t mean that the manager is off the hook when it comes to being involved. Your manager will still need to stay close with each claim and investigation (and you  might as well) in order to ensure that every base is covered and that it will hold up in court. Otherwise, the courts might frown upon your company having let the employees “go wild” without leadership. Documenting every issue in writing is essential here.