Issue - meetings

Reason for Decision

The Performance Management Policy was to help and encourage all employees to achieve and maintain acceptable standards of performance in their work. To achieve this, this procedure had been developed to deal with circumstances where an employee was failing to carry out the duties of their job to an acceptable standard, for reasons related to capability.

This policy had been completely reviewed and re-written to bring it in line with best practice and also to make it more user friendly, by breaking it down into separate appendices for each stage.

This policy had also been reviewed following responses/feedback from the staff survey which outlined that performance could be managed better, and had therefore been reviewed to ensure that it was user friendly for managers to manage performance issues.

Unions outlined that they wished for the appeal time to be extended from 5 days to 10 days (within Appendix 5). Unions felt this would ensure that employees had more time to consider if they wished to appeal or not. 

HR’s view was that this should remain at 5 days, and where necessary a presiding officer could consider a change of the appeal timescales on a case-by-case basis (taking into account the circumstances) at that time.

The Joint Consultative Committees’ view was that having the Presiding Officer to determine appeal times could be subjective and felt that an agreed appeal time was essential to enable due process to be followed. In addition, it was felt that an extended appeal time of 10 days would enable trade union representatives sufficient time to consider if there were grounds for an appeal.

It was therefore recommended that the report proceeded to Executive with the recommendation from JCC that the appeal time be extended from 5 days to 10 days. If this was agreed the enclosed policy would be implemented with the appeal time period extended to 10 days (as opposed to 5 days).