Building a Culture of Employee Discipline

Discipline starts with you.

It's been said "good" is the enemy of "great." Nowhere is this more apparent than in small businesses.

If you're like most small business owners you're looking for an effective way to encourage productivity in your employees. When you find a method that works it's easy to rest on your laurels and call it "good enough." This "good enough" syndrome is the enemy of great small business.

Building a culture of discipline means taking what works, and honing it till it's razor sharp, then systematizing the process and distributing it to every employee.

Dan Kennedy calls this "the program" as in "getting with the program."

What's Your Program?

Your employees need to be completely engaged with their responsibility to help build a great team and organization.

It's up to you, as their leader, to recruit and retain people who are disciplined prior to coming to work for you. When they are your employees you can reinforce the guiding principles they already live by, but no employer can change a bad employee's basic nature.

Hanging Yourself With the Curse of Knowledge: Discipline Must Have Direction

Simply building employee discipline cannot be the endpoint, only the beginning.

Disciplined employees do what needs to be done. But the fact is, most managers aren't sure what to do. This is the fault of management.

They assume their employees know as much about the business as they do. Assumptions about what people know, the "curse of knowledge" is deadly for the manager.

In Stephen Covey's book "The 8th Habit" he describes a poll of 23,000 employees from several different companies. Only 37% of the employees had a clear concept of their organizations goals. Shockingly, only 20% could describe the relationship between their job and the mission of their company.

That's like trying to play golf on a blizzard.

This isn't just a simple lack of employee discipline, it's a matter of undisciplined organizations that have completely lost focus of their primary objective. And took thousands of employees along for the ride!

King Henry the VIII and Your Policy Of Tolerance

Dan Kennedy talks about going into a deli and seeing one of the countertops covered in dust. He says his policy for this business "the discovery of dust would be followed closely by beheadings. . . let a little dust. . . slide and you establish a direction. A policy of tolerance."

Kennedy says you cannot tolerate anything contributing to negative word of mouth about you or your business. Keeping this firmly in mind will help you establish a culture of employee discipline.

You must hold your team members and yourself accountable for undisciplined actions.

If you're managing people, you must devise a system to organize assignments and responsibilities, and a method for hold each person accountable for the results.

As you develop a system that works, train your team on how to use the system. Ask for feedback on how to make the system better, but don't let your employees pick and choose which parts of the system they use.

You should establish a process to ensure people are following the system and of course hold them accountable.

Discipline Vs. Picking the Fly Sh!t Out of the Pepper

There is a point where establishing discipline becomes perfectionism. Perfectionism is paralysis, especially in business. We want action, but we want disciplined action.

McDonalds succeeds as an organization with downright disgusting food (in my opinion). Why?

Because they know and serve the needs and wants of their customers. They maintain a discipline of serving exactly what their customers want: mediocre food, on the go, fast.

You can and should shape your team based on the needs of your customer, then maintain a culture of employee discipline rooted in your clearly defined system and standards.