Performance improvement policy

What’s a performance improvement policy and when should you use it?

Where an employee’s performance falls below the standard you require because of a lack of ability, skill or knowledge you should have a performance improvement policy in place to deal with this.

A performance improvement policy describes the process of performance improvement reviews, what employees may expect from performance improvement reviews and how such reviews are linked to the dismissal of an employee.

It is applicable to all employees.

Sometimes an employee’s ability to perform their duties becomes affected by all manner of factors, which might include an employee’s health deteriorating (temporarily or permanently), or the employee’s job changing over a period of time, where the employee is not able to keep pace with those changes and starts to struggle.

That’s what this policy is designed to cover.

Any performance policy should be:

Objective
Fair
Transparent
Relate to the work the employee does

Like any other policy, we recommend that you do not give this policy contractual status but rather that you reference it in the contract of employment and then incorporate it within your employee handbook.

This gives you the discretion to update and revise it as and when you want to.

You can find our employee handbook template here

You may also find our step by step guide to handling employee performance useful