We recommend a Progressive Discipline Process for managing poor performance that has three distinct stages:
1. Verbal counselling with a view to resolving the performance problem in the early stages
2. If the performance problem persists, you move to the more formal performance improvement stage with the same objective of coaching your employee back to acceptable performance
3. A formal warning letter stage that will result in either performance improvement or termination
Remember, you should always try to coach an employee back to acceptable performance first. The third stage of the Progressive Discipline Process should be used only when the performance improvement process has not yielded the desired results at an agreed upon point in time.
