Documenting Performance: A Manager’s Underused but Necessary Tool

As a people manager experiencing an issue with one of your employees, you already know what’s going on, e.g. your direct report’s performance has dropped noticeably and absences are frequent, and you are seeking HR’s support to help navigate the situation.

Why then does HR ask you to document your performance conversations with your employee, and not just take your word and get on with it? After all, you’re the one on the front line and not HR.

This comes up frequently for me when I’m coaching people managers with employee relations issues, and oftentimes one of the first things I’ll ask, whether its frontline manager, director, or vice president: have you been documenting your conversations?

The primary reason is because memory is fallible, even malleable, and while your observations of your direct report are valuable, they may be more subjective than you’re aware.

Documenting your conversations creates a record and a legal document in a way that just having an undocumented conversation won’t; it creates a paper trail that’s tangible and shareable; and it fixes events in time.

Very importantly, it facilitates sharing the document with your employee to ensure mutual understanding, and allowing them an opportunity to respond, clarify, and dispute your claims – when your direct report has had a reasonable opportunity to review and respond to your documentation, this now becomes much more objective.

These objective data can then be combined with other data points like time and attendance, missed or lagging deadlines, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or other targets, or the frequency and depth of customer interactions documented in your customer relationship management (CRM) platform.

You can also use this data to compare an individual team member’s performance with that of others on the team, though to avoid pitting employees against one another be creative with team averages or expectations for everyone.

In my experience, people manager’s may feel that it’s awkward or overly formal to document conversations with their team members – this is often because employee issues are infrequent, and they rely on their (good) instincts to manage performance relatively informally.

But, as documentation is important for all aspects of performance management – whether developmental or disciplinary – what I highly recommend doing is getting into the habit of documenting all conversations and to “build feedback into the job”, (Armstrong’s Handbook of Human Resource Management Practice, p. 397), so that it’s not considered formal.

Obviously, you don’t need to capture every minute detail but highlighting the relevant points of your 1:1s with your team members in a shareable, organic, and growing document on Microsoft OneNote, for example, can make it the norm to get written feedback after all performance conversations and can work to positively undermine that sense of awkwardness when needing to document a potentially more contentious conversation.

When performance management is documented and ongoing in this way, one is also less likely to fall into the trap of what’s called “recency bias”, where an employee’s most recent performance is applied to the entire year instead of perhaps just being only something that’s happened in the last few weeks for example.

Overall, a question I often ask people managers to bear in mind is: how will the facts hold up in 6 months’ time when they’re being reviewed by senior leadership or potentially by an outside party like an attorney?

Whether it’s when your employee is asking for a raise based on good performance, is potentially now facing progressive discipline based on poor time and attendance, or may be facing termination, you need to be sure that you’ve got all the documentation so that you can respond appropriately.

This is why HR is there to remind you to document, document, document.