Provide Managers with Employee Counseling Training

Although there are common mistakes made during employee counseling, there is something you can do to ensure your managers are providing effective employee counseling—provide them with training.

Providing Managers with Training
New managers should be provided with basic employee counseling training.  It is also important for experienced managers and supervisors to become involved with ongoing training with respect to counseling and the counseling process.

Managers should be aware of the internal employee counseling process within the organization. This includes knowing the appropriate forms to use, knowing what to do with the form after it’s filled out, knowing the process after a counseling meeting is conducted, knowing the different procedures, etc.

For example, is the “Employee Counseling Form” sent to Human Resources (HR) for the employee’s personnel file? Is a copy kept at the department level?

All of this information needs to be part of the training process.

Managers should be trained on the various scenarios that could occur in the workplace, which would lead to the need for employee counseling, such as:

• What to do if an employee quits on-the-spot.
• What to do if an employee becomes upset.
• What to do if two employees (or more) get into an altercation.

Managers need to know how to handle situations like this (and more). If you have a manager that doesn’t have a lot of experience conducting employee counseling meetings, they may be caught off-guard with these types of situations. This is why it’s important to make sure your manager training includes some role play.

Managers also need to be trained:

• To be a good listener and get each employee’s side of the story before making a decision.
• How to prepare for an employee counseling meeting.
• How to determine what the problem is—for example, is it a performance issue? Or a policy violation?
• How to give corrective action steps or explanations pertaining to the employee deficiency, and also provide some additional training (or retraining) if necessary. For example, maybe there is an employee who needs to review a particular policy again to make sure that they’re well-versed in it so the issue doesn’t happen again.
• How to prepare the counseling document, as this is a very important part of the employee counseling process. It’s not always just about taking corrective action, sometimes it’s also about providing guidance and mentoring.

A key to effective employee counseling is to ensure that managers—whether they’re new managers within the organization or managers that have been with the company for awhile—receive ongoing training so that everybody’s on board with the protocols.

No two situations are alike, which is why it’s important to carefully review each situation and develop your managers to be successful in their role at your company.

To ensure your managers are providing effective employee counseling: provide them with training.