• Employers should consistently enforce company policies to avoid legal liability.

Organizations should enforce policies consistently. It’s also important that those responsible for enforcement understand all policies completely. When that is not the case, trouble can ensue.

Beyond just understanding and communicating the organization’s policies, managers are responsible for enforcing policies. In particular, a disciplinary policy should be followed each time the policy is violated, not intermittently. Failing to apply policies consistently can incur liability for the organization.

When employees see that policies aren’t administered fairly, morale is likely to suffer, and employees’ respect for management may also be compromised. Employees are more likely to disregard policies if employees don’t expect the policies will be enforced consistently. Employees may even be caught off guard when policies are enforced, which could lead to charges of unfair treatment.

Failure to enforce policies consistently could also lead to legal liability for any organization. Consider the following example: A strict attendance policy indicates that an employee who is at least 10 minutes late for work three times in a six-month period will be terminated. Managers sometimes note when employees are late, but often look the other way. However, on a particularly trying day, a manager decides to enforce the policy. Following it to the letter, the manager terminates a particularly frustrating employee the third day that the person is late to work.

The problem? The employee is a member of a minority group and files a claim of discrimination against the organization, alleging that the person was fired because of the minority status. Up until this point, other supervisors haven’t enforced this policy to termination, even though several non-minority individuals have been late three times (some even more often than that) in a six-month period.

While this alone does not prove that the individual was specifically discriminated against, the fact that the policy was not consistently enforced may give the claim more weight. If the employee also had other evidence of discrimination based on race, the organization might find itself on the wrong end of a lawsuit, even if the intent of enforcing the policy was not discriminatory in nature.

Policies should be dependable representations of what employees can expect, and regular implementation will make these standards clear. If a manager doesn’t feel comfortable enforcing a policy, the person should not disregard it, but should talk to HR. If the policy is outdated, inappropriate, or difficult to enforce, revise or remove the policy instead of ignoring it.