Improve Your Employee Documentation and Win More UI Protests

The top reason employers lose unemployment claim protests is due to poor or missing employee documentation.  This costs employers a significant amount of money in unemployment charges that they should not be paying - at an average claim cost of nearly $4,000.00 - can you afford to lose protests you shouldn’t?

In an effort to help readers more effectively document employee discipline, here are some tips for employee improving your documentation:

1.    Document events as soon as possible after they occur - it is easy to forget details over time.  Documenting the details of an employee issue right away minimizes the chance of this occurring and improves the effectiveness of your employee documentation.
2.     Do your research - get all of the facts before you take action.  There is nothing more embarrassing than sitting down to discipline an employee and finding out that you did not have the whole story.
3.     Identify all parties involved in the situation - this tip goes hand in hand with number 2.  Make sure you have know who the players are in the situation so that you can get all of the facts before acting.
4.     Be specific - document the situation in as much detail as possible and don’t expect the reader (whomever it may be) to draw their own conclusions.  

• Always use the who/what/when/where/why/with whom paradigm when documenting events.  Making sure that you answered these questions in detail will ensure that your documentation is complete.
• Describe the actions and behaviors involved using concrete facts and observations.
• Always include the negative organizational impact of the incident(s).  For example, if you simply state that the employee missed two deadlines for tax filings, the reader may not understand the importance of the issue.  If you were to state that “the employee missed two deadlines for tax filings which results in 4,000.00 in fines each time” - now you have an impactful piece of documentation.

5.     Be Consistent – When documenting employee discipline, it is critical that you are consistent.  Making exceptions or changing the rules for one employee over another can get you into trouble – Consistency Keeps You Out of Court!
6. Just Do It!  - avoiding documenting employee issues does not help you nor does it help the employees, so make sure that you properly document employee situations as the need arises.

These tips should help you to improve your employee documentation.  Truly, if you do a better job of documenting employee discipline, training, performance, etc. – you will notice a significant improvement in your UI protest wins and you just might find that it helps you in other ways too.  There are many other forms of employee documentation and many, many ways to improve all of them.  For more information, visit us on the web at www.unemploymenttracker.com.