Teller Shortages

We have recently hired some new tellers and are having more teller outages. We have never had issues like this with teller outages, therefore, the bank has not had a written policy on the issue (as far as disciplinary action, etc). We are wanting to put a written policy in place but aren't sure what to include and what we can include (legally). It was suggested to make the teller responsible for the shortage (meaning they would have to personally cover the shortage, possible out of their paycheck, for example), but one employee thought that might be illegal to do. Can anyone share with me their procedures on dealing with teller outages? Thanks.

Bad idea, what would be the difference between a teller outage and an outage on one of your due from bank account reconciliations. Would you make them make it up. Create some Teller Balancing Guidelines. For instance this may include the number of outages and dollar amount for a month for discipinary actions.

If they're over do they get to keep the money? Bad idea - it will push folks to force balance if they get concerned about their job......
Plus, you might want to check your states laws regarding employee compensation, there very well may be issues against that very thing.

I would think that if you would require your tellers to personally cover their shortages, you should require your loan officers to personally cover their charged-off loans. We have a tiered system of written warnings, official probation periods, and termination depending on the dollar amount and frequency of offages. For example, a teller who is off more than $60 in any given quarter is put on 90 days probation with certain privileges, such as incentive payouts, suspended. I had a teller with a $350 overage last year which was never found - I'm sure she would have loved to keep the money, but believe me, she didn't make a donation to the bank...

We have a teller standards policy that relates to % of time in proof, amount of outages, etc. Check with banks in your area - you can probably find a bank that has one - its good to be consistent with bank's close by as tellers sometimes move around. Our policy has a system of progressive discipline and we also, at a certain point, will send for retraining. Termiantion is the last step. Some people just can't count money....

Frenchie, we do the same as far as progressive discipline from probation up to termination and we branch into IL.

In my opinion, our guides/standards are too liberal, but I can't get management to see that so I fight the fight on other fronts.