Date 25 November 2010
In a challenging economy performance management of employees is extremely important, underperformance is best dealt with at an early stage.
Employers often avoid tackling these issues head on for a number of reasons, and not least because discussing problems of performance with an employee can be difficult and uncomfortable. It is actually far worse to leave matters unaddressed. As an employee is then lead to believe they are performing to standard which makes any future attempt to address poor performance unbelievably challenging.
It will reduce the legal risks and enable them to deal with underperforming individuals in a fair and appropriate manner. Business's need clear performance management proces in place thsat can be easily followed by threir management team.
Having a robust, pro-active approach to performance management means that the business is, on the whole, much more efficient, which is imperative in tough economic climates.
Acas produce a very useful set of guidelines on dealing with performance management in their advisory booklet ‘How to manage performance’. This contains some excellent material on the process of:
- identifying the issues
- keeping written records
- giving clear feedback
- how to deal with managing underperformance and disciplinary action
It is far better to deal with the issue head on rather than relying on redundancy or retirement, a business that has methods for dealing with under performance and managers who are confident to deal with these will only benefit in the long term.