Personnel file
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I have an employee that asked if she can review her personnel file. Of course I allowed her to in my office and she was very surprised to see some emails and memos from former managers tied to her "negative" perfomance that were not addressed to her. She became very emotional and distraught. The two managers responsible for the documentation were terminated for some questionable ethics unrelated to this employee. Since the two managers have left the company, the employee in question has been promoted and has excellent performance reviews from new managers. She recently asked me if there's any offcial way that the older documentation can be omitted from her file.
I've always been under the impression that it's not possible to "take out" any documentation, good or bad from a personnel file. Please advise.
FYI - I'm the HR Mgr so I was not with the company when the former managers were employed.
I've always been under the impression that it's not possible to "take out" any documentation, good or bad from a personnel file. Please advise.
FYI - I'm the HR Mgr so I was not with the company when the former managers were employed.
Comments
There is no regulation, law, rule or standard for what you are allowed to remove from a file except those things required by federal or state regulation to be maintained.
Another option, I keep a seperate file (not a secret file) where supervisor's notes etc. are kept referring to coaching sessions and the like. When the superivsor feels that the situation is not likely to improve this is their record of their conversation with the ee. They normally have the date, time, and brief summary of the discussion they had with the ee and is signed by the Supervisor. These papers do not go into the ee's personnel file, but most feel it is safer for these to be under lock and key in HR than left with the Supervisors.
Good luck...
Any employee notes on individuals, I keep in a separate file in my office in case they have to be referred to in the future for any reason.
I'd take these notations and emails out of the file. It's a good idea to let her shred them.
I would let her write a response (signed and dated) to the emails and attach them to the file, with a note from you about what prompted the rebutal from the ee, signed and dated. While I agree that there is nothing to keep you from getting rid of them, I just don't ever want to explain what happened to documents from someone's file to a jury.
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