This blog has contained numerous posts about documentation, an important part of almost every aspect of employment.
But is it possible to overdocument? In a word, yes. How so?
Documenting insignificant or trivial matters–If you do this, it makes all your documentation questionable. Documentation is for important stuff. If you throw in everything, a court is likely to think about throwing it all out.
Creating a paper trail right before an employee is terminated–You’re out to get him/her. You didn’t have your documentation together, so it looks like you made some up. It’s a CYA move that doesn’t even cover your asininity.
Documenting conduct or performance for an employee when you haven’t documented that kind of conduct or performance for any other employee–That’s likely to be called discrimination when you’re sued.
Summarizing in a document prepared right before an employee is terminated several incidents of poor performance or misconduct that occurred over a period of time that you meant to document at the time each incident occurred–CYA rides again and probably overrides just testifying that all these incidents happened, although you have no documentation about them; in other words, you’ll be more believable if you just say the employee did a bunch of things wrong than writing them down the day before he/she is shown the door.
Preparing documentation after an employee is terminated to support the termination–That might be called fabricating evidence.
Documentation is important. It needs to be done the right way. If you haven’t done it the right way, it’ll be better if you just take your chances without any documentation at all.
2 responses so far ↓
1 John Moore // Apr 11, 2008 at 9:53 am
Good points. A couple years back, a Montana human rights decision noted that a supervisor became very scrupulous about documenting every little thing after the employees had filed a complaint. This was treated as evidence of retaliation.
On the other hand, I testified in another human rights case because of my role in training on discipline and documentation. The charging party was alleging “glass ceiling” gender discrimination; the employer countered that she was not a good manager. Among other things, it said, she documented way too much. Prior to testifying, I was instructed to review her supervisory notes. They were pretty good — substantive, objective, not nitpicky. She prevailed in her case.
2 John Phillips // Apr 11, 2008 at 10:01 am
Thanks for the comment, John.
Two good examples drawing the distinciton between documenting the right way and the wrong way.
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