As failure has become a more acceptable part of innovation, one would assume that organizations have also become better at dealing with employees who make mistakes, but, of course, there are mistakes made in the pursuit of something challenging and innovative, and there are mistakes out of incompetence or malfeasance.

A new paper from the University of Southern California outlines how managers can respond to employees who both make honest-to-goodness mistakes and those who err through misconduct so that the employees don’t feel ostracized by their organization.

“Sometimes it’s very costly to fire and hire people. Sometimes an employee has very specialized knowledge or is a very valuable asset to the organization, and the organization doesn’t want to lose that person, like pharmaceutical companies that have global experts on a particular drug. Also, employees can be protected by tenure. And there’s a whole class of actions in which the employee just had really bad judgement, and the manager really believes that if this employee is confronted, the employee wants to learn and will actually change,” the author says. “I think we’ve all messed up in some point in our lives, and many people, if they are confronted with the fact that they messed up, they are willing to do things differently in the future.”

Getting a second chance

The paper suggests that it’s actually more common to give people a second chance than we perhaps think, with less than 1% of employees fired after misconduct.  If that “rehabilitation” is to happen, then the author argues that it needs to be done in the right way.

“If managers want to give transgressors a second chance, then what they really need to do is help transgressors feel like they are fully participating at their organizations again, and help transgressors feel a restored sense of belonging, both from the transgressors’ peers and organizational leaders. Organizations need to think of reintegration as this multilayered process to get the best outcomes possible,” they say.

To reintegrate employees who err effectively, the paper recommends that managers provide support in three main areas:

• Relational belonging, which helps to ensure that any relationships that may have been harmed during the transgression are healed effectively
• Sense of membership, so that the transgressor isn’t frozen out of their team or key activities as a result of their mistake
• Institutional belonging, by ensuring that the individual is treated positively, not just by their direct manager but by managers more generally

“If any one of those three things doesn’t happen, that will prevent transgressors from feeling fully reintegrated, and that could cause them to withdraw engagement from the organization, have lower productivity, leave the organization, or even sabotage the organization,” the author explains.

The findings emerged after a study involving the US military and how army cadets felt after a six-month reintegration program after they had suffered from an honor violation.  Despite all of the cadets having their formal standing restored at the end of the six-month period, only a handful felt they were reintegrated into the academy.

“Even an organization like this, which was devoting considerable resources and time to reintegrate these cadets, to have so many who did not feel fully reintegrated, I think is a bit of a wake-up call for organizations,” the author explains. “It really speaks to the importance of managers knowing what to do, and how they should be structuring second chances, so they can get as many employees feeling fully reintegrated as possible.”