Absolutely right. But there would be no story on the other side because never have I been brought in and accused of underperforming or had a bad attitude or had a client complaint. So what exactly would be their side to the story other than they want a younger, cheaper employee?
The things that come up are limited only by the imagination.
One of the main things I remember is that when I started doing the documentation process with one employee, the individual began complaining that they were being singled out, that none of the co-workers were being scrutinized to the same level.
After the second go-round on that topic and being a good listener, I realized that what was going on, consciously or unconsciously, was that the employee was trying to avoid acknowledging or addressing the performance issues that I was documenting. When I stopped being empathetic and insisted we attend to the performance, then I suddenly became a mean, insensitive, horrible person who was just out to screw employees.
I might add that I started a documentation process with all employees as soon as a deficiency item was noted in a performance review. We would start by talking about the issue, and why I had reached that conclusion. In 80% or more of cases, the employee acknowledged that it was an issue and moved to developing a response program - no further documentation. In the rest of the cases, the employee would request more information so I would start more involved documentation, and schedule a mid-year update with the employee. That took care of all but a handful of cases; those were the situations that were difficult. And they usually were cases where no amount of documentation was adequate; the employee was simply unwilling or unable to recognize the issue, and instead expected that we would adjust the entire work environment to address their particular situation.
So he was certainly correct in his observation that co-workers were not having their work scrutinized to the same level. That wasn't a question of unfairness
In my years of working in a company, I heard occasional stories from employees about how a certain boss was delighting in making their life miserable by documenting work performance issues. But I have never met a manager, including those being talked about in those stories, who enjoyed performance documentation. It's terrible, terrible, terrible work. It's time-consuming. It takes you away from doing other important things. It's not fun. If documentation is done poorly, it's probably because it's such unpleasant work to do.
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A mentor one time gave me a wonderful piece of advice. He said to always be sure that the value I was creating in my job exceeded the salary I was being paid. If I did that well I would always be able to find a job. If my employer was so stupid as to fire me, then I should be glad for the opportunity to go to work for a business that is better run than the one I just left.
If you know how you have been creating value and can document it, you have the easiest job interview in the world. I worked with a guy one time what kept a tally of all of the money saving projects he implemented or was involved with. About July of every year he would schedule a meeting with his boss, where he would show him how in the first six months he had already saved the company more money than they were paying him in his annual salary.
If you don't know how to assess the value of what you are doing, then you need to find out how to do that. And if you can't do that, then you should consider that at any point in time, you are vulnerable to having someone start questioning why you are being paid to do what you are doing.
