Formal intervention

Guide to managing a performance issue formally.

In some cases, informal meetings, development and support are not effective in raising the employees performance to the required standard. If this happens you’ll need to consider a more formal approach with your employee.

Once you start down the path of performance improvement it should be a forward looking process. You set out what the issues or concerns are and focus on these. If you try later to raise different, older issues then the process may be viewed as being unfair and not in good faith.

Use these tools to guide you through the performance improvement process:

Different to a disciplinary process

Managing a performance issue is different to managing a misconduct issue. It’s important to use the correct process for the issue you have with your employee.

It is an employer's obligation to try to resolve problems in good faith. In cases of performance issues, good faith means giving an employee a real opportunity to improve their performance and helping them to do so, while making sure that they know and understand their performance expectations. In cases of misconduct this means conducting a fair and full investigation and giving the employee the opportunity to be heard.

Management action, not disciplinary action, is needed to fix most performance issues.

Formal performance management, using warnings and/or dismissal should be considered only after consideration of other management actions (more information, clarification, better leadership, extra training, coaching or counselling) to fix the employee’s performance issues.

Disciplinary action may be appropriate in the case of an employee’s misconduct or misbehaviour.

Managing formal intervention

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