Importance of evaluating your employees—The good and the bad

As we approach the end of another year, some of you may be gearing up for the year-end performance evaluation season. Conducting proper performance evaluations can play a critical role in your organization’s ability to address issues with poor-performing employees, as well as retain your good employees. The purpose of this article is to provide some guidance to help you navigate through the performance evaluation process and to identify potential legal issues that could arise.

Address issues that need to be addressed

An important part of the evaluation process is that it gives the company the opportunity to highlight performance issues and address them before it’s too late. From a legal perspective, it’s critical that any performance issues are identified in the performance evaluation and documented. Sometimes it’s difficult to properly evaluate an employee who is underperforming and even more difficult to have a face-to-face conversation with them about those issues. If you let a performance issue slide, however, it can become difficult to take the necessary steps later to deal with the performance issues.

For instance, if an employer decides to discipline or discharge an employee because of a performance issue, and if a subsequent lawsuit or grievance is filed, one of the important issues in the case will be to determine what the employee’s past performance evaluations say.