Why you might have a good case for a personal grievance if dismissed for performance

So you’re undergoing a performance management process- you may have been told it might happen to you, you may have received a letter, received a warning, or been dismissed.  See here for what happening in the background, but you want to know what to look for to see if you’ve got good grounds for a case.

The job you’re assessed against is unclear

Most position descriptions/Job descriptions are sketchy and unreliable; poor or old reflections of what you’re supposed to do.  No one likes writing or updating position descriptions, so most likely they aren’t correct.  If your boss is assessing you against it, but it’s not 100% accurate to what the job actually is, then make notes on this.  Check with colleagues who do the same job as you, to see if it’s accurate for them.  The bigger the gap, the harder it is for them to say you’re not doing the job right.

If what you’re being assessed against isn’t on the position description, that’s also a problem for them.   Because how could you have known you needed to that if it’s not documented as part of the job?  If you signed a contract to do a job that doesn’t include a task and now your job is at risk over how you’re doing it- how is that fair?  You never agreed to do it, now your losing your job over it?

They didn’t set the KPIs properly

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are different to above, because they are measures or targets of your work.  If the task is washing the dishes, the KPI is how many dishes you wash in an hour.  For some jobs this is easily done, for most jobs, especially service jobs, this is very hard to do, because they aren’t easy to quantify.  For example, how do you set KPIs for how a teacher supporting students in the classroom?  How do you set KPIs for a police officer to build good community relations?  These are important things, and easy to see when done well, but hard to measure.

Your boss needs to set KPIs to your tasks so that they and you can see if you have, or have not done it.  Too often it’s a ‘I’ll know it when I see it’, or ‘no screw-ups’ approach, but this is in their eyes, and only after the event.  If you’re walking out of the meeting with the understanding that your boss is going to make a judgement call next meeting whether you’ve done your job well, that’s too subjective.

They haven’t trained you enough

Your boss can’t just expect you to do the job and fire you if you don’t.  In some countries yes, but in many countries no (see here for a discussion on differences between countries).  The more your legal environment supports employees, the more it’s expected that employers need to help people learn how to do the job.  If you’ve not been trained, or specifically they can’t demonstrate you’ve been trained, that’s a problem for them

The intuition problem

Intuition is a difficult word to use for this, but it fits (this is a little ironic if you think about it).   Some people just get a task intuitively- they take to it like a duck to water, it’s a natural fit of their personality or experiences to what needs to be done.  Others don’t just get it, and blunder their way through it.  You may not be taking to it like duck to water, you may be making mistakes, you may be missing that intuitive grasp.  But this is not your problem- just because you’re not a natural doesn’t mean you won’t get there.  Some employees take no training, some take more.   Just because you take more doesn’t make it your fault.