Letter inviting employee to attend final formal meeting about performance

What’s an invitation to an employee to attend the final formal meeting about their performance and when should you use it?

This invitation to a meeting follows on from the earlier stages in your performance improvement process.

You will need this one where you have already had several meetings with the employee and issued them with a first formal written warning notice concerning their levels of performance – specifically, that they are not satisfactory.

If the employee’s performance has still not improved in spite of these earlier steps, this letter is the next one in the series.

You should only use this suite of materials in relation to employees.

If you were to apply your performance improvement proceedings to someone who is not an employee, or to treat them in an equivalent manner, this could lead inadvertently to the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) concluding that that individual does in fact have employment status – including the enhanced rights attaching to such status.

What else might you need?

Following on from this meeting, you will probably need to issue the employee with a final written warning notice providing them with information about what they must do to prevent the process from going any further (one potential avenue being that you move to dismiss them.)

Your starting point for handling any concerns with an employee’s performance should be consulting your performance improvement policy, which will set out, step by step, the process that you will generally follow, as well as what your employee can expect and what they will need to do to comply with the process. You should be referring to it at every stage of this process.

The terms of the employee’s contract with you will also be relevant.