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Employee Performance Improvement Plan: Protocol Before And After
The employee performance improvement plan can be a powerful tool for helping an underperforming employee to improve in certain areas of his/her job, but in rare cases, even a plan such as this will not be sufficient to correct an employee’s deficiencies, usually due to a lack of motivation on the employee’s part. In these cases, a manager will have little recourse but to take adverse action against the employee, up to, and including termination. Before all this can happen, however, before an employment improvement plan can be issued and prior to any adverse action due to a lack of improvement as measured by the employee performance improvement plan, a certain protocol must always be followed. This protocol, which we will discuss in more detail in this article, is designed first, to protect the employee from unfair treatment, and second, to protect the employing company from legal action should the employee in question decide to file a wrongful termination suit.
The Employee Performance Improvement Plan: Before One Is Issued
Although an employee performance improvement plan is not intended to be a punitive action against an employee, but rather a tool to help them improve their deficiencies, the truth is that most employees will see it as such, and therefore, there are certain measures that must first be taken before one of these plans can even be issued. These measures include:
• Notify employee of performance standards. Although the performance standards were probably made clear at the time an employee was hired, these standards must be reiterated when a supervisor notices an employee’s deficiencies.
• Allow enough time for performance to improve. The exact amount of time that a company is required to allow for employee improvement varies, and depends largely on a particular company’s written policy and/or the severity of underperformance (actions that are seen as dangerous or threatening require no time allowance).
• Notify employee of deficiencies. If after the allotted amount of time for improvement has elapsed, the employee has failed to correct his/her actions or behavior, the supervisor must orally inform the employee of his/her deficiencies in relation to the performance standards.
• Document those deficiencies. In documenting performance deficiencies the manager must be very specific, listing first what the expected performance is, followed by concrete examples of how the employee is deficient in relation to those expectations.
• Provide guidance and assistance. A certain level of guidance and assistance aimed at helping an employee to improve must be provided by the supervisor prior to placing an employee on an employment performance improvement plan.
The Employment Performance Improvement Plan: After One Is Issued
After following the steps above, if there is still not an acceptable degree of improvement, the manager can then place the employee on a written performance improvement plan. These plans, which include goals, specific steps aimed at reaching those goals and timelines for improvement, are designed to help the employee improve his/her performance in areas of deficiency. However, if the timelines indicated in the performance improvement plan elapse, and there is still no measurable improvement, adverse action can then be taken by the hiring company. In these cases, the employee must first be notified in writing by his/her supervisor of the proposed adverse action (formal write-up, suspension, termination, etc.), and this proposal would then be sent to the person or division within the company—owner, district manager, human resources—that is responsible for making a final decision based on the proposal. If the employee has written a response to the proposal, a letter addressing this response will be included with the final decision.
This may seem like a great amount of “red tape,” but unless these steps are followed both before and after an employment performance improvement plan is issued, there could be legal repercussions that could potentially damage the employing company.