Letter rescheduling performance review meeting

If you need to postpone a scheduled performance review meeting, or if you agree to an employee’s request to postpone, you can use our letter.

Acas Code of Practice

The statutory Acas Code of Practice on Disciplinary and Grievance Procedures sets out the principles for handling disciplinary situations in the workplace, and it applies to poor performance as well as misconduct. According to the Code, this includes notifying the employee in writing of the poor performance problem and allowing them to attend a formal meeting to answer the case against them – use our Notice of Performance Review Meeting. However, occasionally it may be necessary to postpone this meeting and this could be either at your behest or following a request from the employee. You can use our Letter Rescheduling Performance Review Meeting for this. It covers three potential circumstances where you might need to postpone.

Business need

The first is where there are unforeseen business circumstances, such as the chair of the meeting being taken unexpectedly ill. It’s important you have an essential business reason for postponement, as you don’t want your employee to later argue that your performance management process was unfair. We’ve gone on to set out a new date and time for the meeting, stated that the performance issues to be discussed remain the same and confirmed that the postponement won’t in any way affect the conduct of the meeting or its outcome.

Further performance issues

Occasionally, further poor performance issues may come to light between setting up the meeting and it taking place. In this case, and assuming the additional issues aren’t just trivial ones you would normally ignore, it’s advisable to postpone the meeting whilst you investigate them. Then, if necessary, deal with everything together at the one meeting. What you must never do is just spring additional alleged poor performance issues on the employee at the meeting itself. So, our letter has a paragraph that enables you to postpone the meeting while you investigate the further issues. If there’s then a case to answer on the further issues, you’ll need to send out a new notice of performance review meeting referring to the revised list of issues.

Employee’s request

Finally, our letter provides for a postponement at the employee’s own request. Under the legislation, if the employee’s chosen companion is not available at the time you originally proposed for the meeting, they can suggest an alternative reasonable time which is within five working days of the original date (plus it may be reasonable for you to agree to a postponement which is beyond the five working days). Other valid reasons why an employee may request a postponement include genuine illness, approved annual leave and to obtain legal advice. Do allow at least one postponement if the employee’s reasons are valid. However, where they’re repeatedly unable or unwilling to attend the meeting, you’ll then need to consider all the facts and come to a reasonable decision as to how to proceed.