Episode Three – Managing Performance

Hello, and welcome to the third installment in our employment law bite-size series. In the program so far, we've looked at how you recruit new employees and then onboard them. And now we're going to look at a topic which is often challenging, but a frequent occurrence during the employment life cycle, and that's managing performance. So the first question is, when do you need to manage an employee's performance?

Yeah, so put simply, it could be at any time, any time that the employee's performance is not meeting the level expected by the business. This could happen in situations where an employee is not meeting specific targets set by the business, say sales targets, or it might be less tangible. It might be written work product or team management is not at that expected level. And so if you do reach that point, you then need to pick the right person to manage it.

And the right person is going to be someone more senior than the employee in question, who understands the expectations of the role and who understands how the employee's performance is falling short. Now usually that's the employee's line manager, but it could be someone more senior than that, perhaps because that more senior person has greater experience managing performance or because there's a difficult working relationship between the employee in question and their direct line manager. Either way, we'd normally expect HR to be involved from the outset so they can provide guidance on the process. And talking process, what does a performance management process look like?

So it can start informally with guidance and feedback, which may just nip the issue in the bud before it becomes a problem. But if that's not enough, you then go into a formal management process. This will often start with a meeting with the individual employee where you discuss the performance concerns, the expectations of the business, any questions the employee might have, any support mechanisms you might put in place to help any improvement, and any improvement targets or goals for the employee to meet. The employee then gets a period of time, say three months, to work towards those improvement targets. You will review frequently over that period of time, and if the improvement tracking is not there, then there'll be an escalating set of warnings. And that is a really critical part of the process, and so it might be helpful to have that written down.

Yeah, a policy can be a really effective way, both of setting the employer's expectations around expected levels of performance, but also the employee's expectations around what a performance management process might look like. A policy will also help you comply with the Acas code on disciplinaries and grievances, which is equally applicable to performance management processes. I guess the final point to bear in mind is that each performance management process will look a bit different and needs to be individual to the specific employee in question. An employee might, for example, have a disability that you need to take into account, and you might need to make reasonable adjustments both to the process and possibly the targets as well. Join us next time where we're going to be taking a look at how you manage grievances and complaints.