Stay on Top of Employee Performance to Avoid a Wrongful Termination Suit

  Career Development  

Here is a scenario that probably sounds familiar to some of you out there: The manager walks into the human resources office, sits down and begins to tell a tale of months and months of poor performance of an employee. No, the manager has not had a conversation with the employee other than the occasional "walk-by." We all know the walk-by! It is a common tactic used by many managers with the hope that if they mention an issue in passing to an employee, this will count towards performance counseling with HR. Obviously this is not the case. In order to correct an employee's performance, there must be an employee performance meeting in which the performance inadequacies and future expectations are laid out before the employee. I know, I know, you don't need one more meeting in your life and, yes, if everyone simply did their job your life would be much simpler (makes you sort of rethink that celebration you had with the big promotion to PM, doesn't it?). However, to put an employee on warning or even terminate said employee, these conversations--along with their results--must be documented in great detail.

I have charted a few simple rules that you should follow for a productive and successful employee performance meeting and, if necessary, termination.

This flow chart represents all of the steps you must take to successfully begin the…

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