Hi Kirsten,

Radical I know but I would do away with the Capability Procedure if you can!  It becomes another process for managers to follow (or get confused by) and in my experience destroys the relationship between the employee and manager so inevitably things turn sour.  Problems with capability/performance should be dealt with as informally as possible in normal check-ins (although it’s important to add that managers should keep notes of meetings e.g. “a follow up email to confirm our discussion this morning and what we agreed” in case things turn bad later on). There are some top tips in having a difficult conversation in our Leader Box.

If the informal approach after several check-ins/support/training doesn’t work and the employee and manager can’t have an open and honest conversation about what this means “we’ve come to the end of the road here”, then I would use the disciplinary procedure, but this should be a last resort.

You might find this guide to helping managers have difficult conversations useful.

Interested to know how you feel about that?

Best wishes,

Disruptive HR Team