Employee performance management record

It’s advisable to keep a brief summary of an employee’s performance management history on file, even if the full details have been removed because the warning has expired. Use our record to do this.

A summary record

When you take formal action under your Capability Procedure relating to an employee’s poor performance, you will have put together a file of relevant paperwork which probably comprises the notice of performance review meeting letter, copies of the relevant documentary evidence, minutes of the meeting, the performance warning letter issued, any appeal letters, etc. As that’s a lot of paperwork to go through if you need to refer to it again during the validity period of the performance warning, we recommend you also transfer the key details to a summary record. This is the purpose of our Employee Performance Management Record. Our record enables you to summarise the date the sanction for poor performance was imposed, the type of sanction imposed (first performance warning, final performance warning, etc.), the date the sanction will expire and the reason why performance management action was taken, together with details of any appeal lodged by the employee. That way, you can instantly see what the employee’s formal performance management record comprises. This is particularly useful if their performance levels don’t sufficiently improve either during a set review period or otherwise while a previous warning is still active and so you want to move to the next stage of the process, e.g. from a first performance warning to a final performance warning, or from a final performance warning to dismissal.

Expired warnings

Once a performance warning has expired, which is generally after six months in the case of a first warning and twelve months in the case of a final warning, in order to comply with the UK GDPR you should then remove the relevant paperwork from the employee's personnel file and securely and permanently destroy it. This is because one of the data protection principles states that personal data must not be kept for longer than is necessary for the purposes for which the data are processed. However, there’s nothing to stop you destroying the paperwork but using our record to briefly summarise the performance management action and sanction. This is because it could still have some future relevance. The general rule is that, once a warning has expired, you can’t take it into account when determining a subsequent performance management sanction. However, this doesn’t mean expired warnings can never be considered. If the employee’s poor performance is sufficiently serious in itself to justify dismissal, i.e. it’s gross negligence, you can take into account previous poor performance which is the subject of an expired warning to explain why you’ve decided to dismiss the employee for gross negligence in circumstances where you may have applied a less serious sanction to another member of staff. What you can’t do though is use an expired warning to elevate general poor performance into a dismissable “offence”.