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Performance Appraisals
Discuss employment-law issues such as family leave, overtime, disabilities law, harassment, immigration and termination.
Is there any legal liability when performance reviews are not conducted consistenly(i.e.,annually)? In other words, review cycles continue to change due to no change in employment status.
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Performance Appraisals
posted at 5/17/2001 6:14 AM EDT
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Posts: 2217
First: 6/16/1999 Last: 12/13/2001 |
There is no law that say: thou shalt conduct performance reviews on an annual basis (or at all). So, why do employers conduct performance reviews in the first place? I'll ask our HR experts toadd their views, but in part it is to help employees become more productive by sharing with them what they do well and not so well, and how they can improve in the future.
Now, there can certainly be legal ramifications to performance appraisals. For example, employee X sues, alleging she was fired because of her race. The company says she was fired for poor performance. The jury looks at her performance reviews for the last 10 years: all say she was "outstanding." You can see how this would be relevant evidence (not necessarily dispositive, but certainly relevant). On the other hand, if the performance reviews all said she was terrible, well, that would be relevant as well. Onto your question as to whether there is "legal liability when annual reviews are not conducted consistently." In the absence of any evaluations, some employees' lawyers might argue to the jury: the company is now telling you how bad employee x was. No one told her when she worked there. Look, there's not even a performance review. This "poor performance" argument is a sham, a mere pretext for age discrimination. |
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Performance Appraisals
posted at 5/17/2001 8:14 AM EDT
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Posts: 169
First: 4/25/2000 Last: 2/10/2004 |
I lost count of the number of times that supervisors have blamed the HR Department for making them keep unproductive employees "just bcause they have received favorable performance evaluations."
(We are heavily unionized and have a hearing procedure for discipline) People don't seem to get that the performance evaluation is the official answer to "How am I doing?" As indicated by EB&G, in our experience, the liability for faulty (or sometimes not faulty) evaluations comes from whatever argument the employee can make from the way the process was handled. If most employees received their evaluation yearly, but THIS employee hasn't received one in 18 months and then it was negative, was this a slip-up, or were you retaliating against her because she complained about safety issues? I laways ask for the performance evaluations when a performance issue arises, and I always ask if all similarly situated emplyees also received evaluations, and how they compared. |
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