Documenting Performance Issues

It’s important companies have a plan for recording positive and negative job performances.

By Alexandra Walsh

Human resource (HR) professionals and supervisors play a crucial role in evaluating and documenting employee performance. This involves their establishing clear expectations, providing regular feedback, and noting both positive and negative job performance.

Effective documentation of a performance issue is vital for fairness, consistency, and legal compliance. It also helps identify areas for improvement and supports decisions related to promotions, disciplinary actions, or terminations.

What Is It?

When an employee doesn’t meet the specific requirements of their job such as attendance, objectives, or standards for upholding company culture, it’s considered an employee performance issue.

Typically, managers or supervisors first discuss performance issues with employees and then have the person handling HR document the conversation. On the other hand, HR might also be the ones responsible for telling employees about performance issues and keeping a record of it.

Why It’s Important

It’s essential to document issues related to performance. It maintains a written record of an employee’s tenure with the company, their relationships with their manager or supervisor and colleagues, and their compliance history with the policies outlined in the employee handbook.

Documenting employee performance helps to ensure fairness in investigations and provides an objective view when evaluating an employee’s behavior at work. It’s also a good idea for managers to maintain a file on each employee to track their progress. This can be done on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis.

How to Document

Follow these five steps when documenting employee performance issues:

Present Facts and Expectations

Meeting with an employee to discuss their performance provides the opportunity to present all the relevant facts related to their circumstances. Facts can be provided to you by a manager or supervisor, depending on the severity of the performance issue. Gather metrics or performance measurements and benchmarks to help plan how you’ll explain the performance gap to the employee and how they can meet the expectations required by the company.

When writing a report, be careful not to use subjective words like “never” or “always” when describing an employee’s performance even if they don’t have a record of completing a specific task.

Instead, use numerical data to support your analysis. This way, employees can provide evidence to dispute the report or themselves set targets to improve their performance. In one-on- one meetings about performance, you want to remain an objective voice.

Focus on Behavior

When writing a behavior-based report, focus on the actions themselves, not the individual’s personality. The report should detail the employee’s behavior that led to the issue, as it is explained by their manager or supervisor.

By holding employees accountable, you can offer guidance to help them improve and perform more effectively at work. The ultimate aim is to achieve a shared understanding between you the evaluator and him or her the employee and develop a plan for success.

Documenting employee performance helps to ensure fairness in investigations and provides an objective view when evaluating an employee’s behavior at work.

Align Performance Records

If an employee’s performance or behavior has previously violated the policies outlined in the employee handbook, take some time to describe the nature of those violations and why they prompted a manager or supervisor to report the issue.

Workplace conduct requirements are generally detailed in an employee handbook, and concentrating on the specific violations provides the employee with an understanding of why their performance may be considered misconduct or subpar. Be sure to have a copy of the printed employee handbook highlighting the specific requirement that the employee failed to meet.

If this is their first violation of the employee handbook or a case where they haven’t been meeting a performance standard, it may be easier for the employee to absorb this information. Therefore, keep this in mind when holding employees accountable for their actions in writing.

Describe Proof of Misconduct

Gather information from the employee’s manager or supervisor and collect written emails from their colleagues to demonstrate proof of their actions. A comprehensive report should provide the employee with a complete understanding about how information about their performance was gathered, as well as the nature of the misconduct that occurred in the workplace.

Identify and Present Consequences

Take the action in the step above to assign the right disciplinary action for an employee. It also helps pinpoint why an employee isn’t meeting the company’s standards or isn’t addressing an existing issue. The goal is to set a deadline for when an employee needs to meet expectations, so that they can perform their job well.

Meet and Sign

Meetings about performance and misconduct should always take place in person. This way, you can provide all the necessary information gathered during the investigation, and the employee can process and analyze it, and be able to ask any relevant questions.

After discussing all questions related to the documentation of their performance, have the employee sign a document acknowledging they have read and understood the content of the document. Also, inform the employee that signing the document confirms they had a conversation with the HR team member regarding their performance.

The document is not an agreement about the content gathered and discussed. It is an acknowledgement of the discussion having taken place.

While it is a good practice to have employees sign the document as well as performance reviews to avoid any disputes that an employee was never shown anything about their performance, there is no legal requirement for the employee to sign the document.

Employees often object to signing documents criticizing their performance. There are two potential responses to this objection: (1) Have the employee’s acknowledgment clearly state that the employee’s signature is only acknowledging receipt of the document, not agreeing with the content. (2) If the employee simply refuses to sign, have the manager or supervisor or a witness sign and date the document with a notation that the document was provided to the employee and he or she refused to sign.

Also, it’s a misconception that there is no legal requirement for employers to provide employees with three warnings before termination, as long as the company maintains its at-will status for the employee.

Not Overly Official

Company managers often feel like they need to wait until they can officially document an employee’s performance using the company’s standard form. However, they need training on how to document performance effectively.

It’s essential to make it clear that while the company’s forms are preferred, documentation can be accomplished in various formats. These include the manager emailing themselves or HR, keeping a manager’s log, using any available paper, or even electronically on other company devices.

Given the data associated with emails, such as the time and date created, they are excellent documentation of a manager’s conversation with an employee about performance issues.

Managers should also be reminded that they need to document verbal warnings in some manner—if the verbal warnings are not documented, it’s as if they never occurred.

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Having a meeting with an employee about their job performance when they are falling short can be difficult. But the most important thing is that the meeting is handled fairly.

Companies that take the time to document the meetings, and have the document spell out the issue while also providing an opportunity for the employee to meet expectations, are the companies that know they were indeed fair to everyone involved.

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Alexandra Walsh is the vice president of Association Vision, a Washington, D.C.–area communications company. She has extensive experience in management positions with a range of organizations.