Productive Performance Appraisals, Second Edition

Chapter 5. Document, Document, Document

Have you ever sat down to work on an evaluation of one of your employees for an upcoming performance appraisal and had your mind go blank? Of course, you know the employee well. You know what he has been working on for the past four weeks and . . . what else? What did go on with that employee in the past six months or a year?

Well, you should never experience this type of anxiety again because a mandatory component of productive performance appraisals is that you keep an up-to-date journal on each of your employees. The buzzword here is “documentation.”

You may well agree with documentation of employee performance in theory, but in practice you think you just don’t need it. Let’s look at some of the reasons ...