When you have started any performance improvement plan with an employee, it is essential that you are doing your follow-up work in a timely manner.

Once you have given your employee a memo or a probation letter with corrective actions that are needed and the corresponding deadlines, you need to mark your own calendar. When deadlines have been given, you need to be prepared to meet with the employee on each of those deadline dates to find out whether or not the corrective action has been taken and is up to your expectations. You must also document each follow-up meeting.

When you have problems with an employee, you are putting things off and making the situation worse if you're not meeting weekly to discuss the issues' current status. Even if the deadlines are not weekly, you want to keep an eye on the situation.

When a supervisor comes to me and says there have been continuing issues for months, as an HR person, I going to ask for specifics. I would not be happy to discover that a memo was given to the employee two months ago and nothing had been done since.

Once the plan is activated, you need to continue moving forward with it until either the employee is now performing as expected (the ideal outcome) or the decision has been made to terminate employment of this individual. There are no in-betweens.

If your supervision is sporadic, then you may have to start the performance improvement process over again because too much time has elapsed between your request for correction action and your follow-up. You need to be consistent with your follow-up for it to be effective. This is why good communication with your employees is so important. If you can eliminate problems early on, you'll save yourself a lot of time overall.

The next article in this series will discuss escalating to probationary status.