Employee Follow-up–Tip of the Week

Employers routinely use disciplinary write-ups and warnings, as well as performance reviews as a way of managing employees.  One thing that often falls through the cracks is follow-up with the employee after the discipline or review.  The follow-up is as important as the discipline and the review.

If you’ve disciplined an employee and she never hears another word from you, the effect of the discipline will be lost.  If you don’t care enough to follow up, why should the employee care enough to change her ways?  If the employee doesn’t change and you’re not doing anything about it because of the failure to follow up, you lose the chance to remove a bad employee from the workplace.  You can always try later on, of course, but there’s a pretty effective argument coming back at you that if the employee’s conduct was bad enough for termination, why didn’t you follow up?  Why didn’t you do anything about it sooner?  If it wasn’t important enough for you to follow up with employee and see whether she had corrected the problem pretty soon after the disciplinary action, how can you say it’s important enough to fire her now?

When it comes to performance reviews, employee follow-up is also important.  If the review is done right, there will be at least a few areas that need improvement.  You will also have established goals for the employee to meet during the next review period.  If you don’t follow up after a performance review, the message to the employee will be the same as the one noted above as to discipline:  this isn’t important; when my supervisor gives me a performance review, she’s just going through the motions.

Warnings and reviews can be effective ways of managing employees.  They won’t be nearly as effective, however, if you don’t follow up with the employee shortly afterward to make sure that conduct and performance are changing and that goals are being met.