What can we do to get our supervisors and managers to pay attention to documentation? We’re ending up too often with too little documentation to support our discipline and terminations.
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Here’s what you had to say:
- It’s mostly in training. Most new supervisors and a lot of experienced ones just don’t know what to do. They’re not facile writers, and they are not confident that they’ll get it right. We go through training for all supervisors that gives them the tools they need. We go through several hypothetical situations, like tardiness, insubordination, and productivity, and we have them do the steps of our discipline program. We say, “OK, the next week, they’re late again. What do you do?” — R.B.
- I’ve found that my supervisors just don’t understand the role that documentation plays in legal proceedings. We find that if we spend some time going over a few cases they start to see that poor documentation–theirs–can cost the organization millions. (We’ve got our own examples of expensive lawsuits that turned on documentation problems, but if you’re lucky and never had one, examples are not hard to find.) — M.C.
- It’s the old story: What the manager pays attention to, the supervisors pay attention to. In some regular way, you have to get your managers to be on top of their supervisors’ documentation. Obviously, you can’t wait until there’s a complaint or lawsuit. I expect managers to be in contact with me when their employees have performance issues so I can be sure they carry out consistent, meaningful documentation. — J.W.