Make Sure HR Is Involved

Assuming that the performance meeting doesn’t directly solve the problem, it’s time to get HR involved. Don’t go two or three performance meetings before getting HR into the mix, by the way—letting a performance problem linger has never actually solved anything. Either you’re working to solve the problem (including actively monitoring/“checking in” with your report to see how things are going at home, for example), or it’s getting worse.

Looping HR in is often just as easy as sending your HR representative an email saying, “I have a performance problem with Joshua, and I’d like to get HR involved.” This is, literally, their job. They have a raft of tools and ideas, processes and procedures, templates and forms, all of them geared towards handling this exact situation so that it’s handled legally and correctly. Getting them involved sooner rather than later is pretty much always the right call—if they feel like it’s too soon, they’ll tell you, give you some advice on what to do next, and check in with you later to see how it’s going.

Friends and allies: Developers often have something of a strong dislike for the folks in Human Resources, and frankly, it’s something we need to move past, particularly when you make the step into management. As a manager, HR is your friend and ally, just as the QA team or the Infrastructure team are allies of developers. Yes, sometimes they’ll “get in the way” when you want to make something happen—just as QA will “get in the way” when you’re trying to push dev to production. Work with them, ask them questions, consider them partners, and I think you will find that they will make your job vastly easier, not harder.

From here, HR will likely schedule a meeting with the direct report to discuss next steps, which will most likely include the crafting of an “action plan” or “performance improvement plan.”