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Performance Management

Managing employees is all about relationships and poor, inadequate or under-performance is usually a symptom rather than a diagnosis. Meaning it is the starting point, not the end point for most managers who don’t want to find themselves embroiled in costly legal conflict with their employee. The relationship established with an employee, the communication engaged in and importantly the presence of trust is often important to a managers/ supervisors likely success in performance management.

As the employer it is up to you to set out:

  • the performance standard expectations of your employees consistently and professionally
  • to monitor achievement of these standards consistently and professionally
  • to engage an employee in continuous supervision and feedback around where they are failing, meeting or exceeding performance expectations.
  • to establish trust by building understanding of expectations, processes relating to performance management as a day to day process
  • to establish trust that all employment related matters will be dealt with professionally, ethically and confidentially

Despite a practice’s and their employees efforts to remediate performance issues sometimes an employee is simply not able to meet the standard expected. In this instance you may wish to consider terminating their employment on the basis that they have not passed their probation period.

Employment probation periods

  • An organisation with more than 15 employees has up to 6 months probation period in which they can lawfully terminate an employee’s contract on the basis that an employee has not passed their probation
  • An organisation with less than 15 employees has up to 12 months probation period in which they can lawfully terminate an employee’s contract on the basis that an employee has not passed their probation

FairWork have a range of resources available to assist you in such circumstances:

In many instances a registrar will be with their training practice for less than 6 months if you are looking to terminate on the basis that performance management of the registrar has been unsuccessful and you have determined that they are not a good fit for your business. You should be careful to read and understand the time requirements to terminate based on failed probation period before making any decisions and use the FairWork templates and information in determining and navigating the most appropriate legal pathway for your business.

Useful links and resources:

Managing performance

Managing underperformance