Removing documents from a personnel file

FJN

An employee has requested that a letter of reprimand written prior to my
coming to the company be removed from her personnel file. The letter is not exactly harsh and the manager who wrote it was asked to leave some time ago. I have never removed anything from an employee's file before. Are there legal issues here? I'd appreciate your feedback.

Theresa Gegen TX

I would consider two issues in making this decision:

1. What is the employee's reason for wanting it removed, is it a valid reason, and can it be verified. (If the letter is suspect, you may not want anyone relying on it in making future employment decisions -- for example if your company was going to have a lay off).

2. What is the company policy on these types of letters (do they expire after a certain amount of time? Has the company ever rescinded these letters before and for what reasons?).

Good Luck!

Gar

In a prior HR assignment for a major corporation, our policy was that if an employee kept his/her nose clean for 6 years, disciplinary action documentation was removed from the file. However, that didn't mean that a copy wasn't kept somewhere else just in case.

Margaret Morford

I recommend that you never remove a document from someone's file. Once you create a corporate document, I'd never destroy it. You should have a corrective action policy that begins the process over again if the employee has corrected the problem and had no other incidences for a specified period of time. (I like six months.) This gives employees an incentative to "keep their noses clean" once they have corrected the problem. Every once in a while a manager will issue corrective action to an employee and then later uncover facts that would exonerate the employee or the company finds that the supervisor was being unduly harsh. When this happens, you should write a memo to the file stating that this piece of corrective action was issued in error and should no longer be considered a part of the corrective action process. This way you preserve the paper trail and you do not have an employee out there with a document of which you no longer have a copy. If the employee's performance has improved significantly since the corrective action was issued, his/her supervisor might consider writing a memeo to the file noting that his/her performance has improved significantly since the correcctive action was issued.

Margaret Morford
theHRedge
615-371-8200
[email]mmorford@mleesmith.com[/email]
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