What Has to Exist Before the First Conversation
The four documents and one note that need to be in an employee's file before a dismissal process starts, and what to do when they are not there.
What one organisation had in the file on the day it opened a conduct process
Three of the seven did not exist, and two of those three were the ones the process depended on. Every row is what one organisation found in its own file, not a statement of what any jurisdiction requires.
Four things have to be in the file before anybody is told their job is at risk. Three of them are documents: the written terms, the policy said to have been breached, and evidence that the policy ever reached the person. The fourth is a note made at the time the concern first arose, and it is the one that is almost never there.
The workflow in “What Has to Exist Before the First Conversation” becomes more reliable when work records, approvals and later corrections can be distinguished. For teams exploring employee monitoring software, employee monitoring software can provide practical context, while policy ownership, employee explanation and final decisions remain with accountable people.
That matters more than the rest put together. A process assembled after a decision has been reached reads exactly like what it is, and no amount of procedural care applied afterwards disguises it. The work described on this page is cheap, takes an afternoon, and cannot be done retrospectively.
For an independent reference relevant to “What Has to Exist Before the First Conversation”, consult the CISA insider-threat mitigation resources. Use it to test record quality, access, retention, fair process and exception handling against the organisation’s real departure workflow.
The note nobody made
The first time a manager was uneasy about something, they mentioned it to somebody over coffee and did not write it down. Six months later that conversation is the entire basis of a case, and it exists only as a recollection that has had six months to improve.
A contemporaneous note is not a formal document. It is a dated line saying what happened, who was there and what was said, written the same week by the person who was there. It does not need to be shown to anyone at the time, and in most cases it never is.
What makes it worth anything is precisely that it was written before anyone knew where this was going. A note written on the day the decision was taken proves only that a decision was taken.
Four documents, and whether they are really there
Being able to find a document is not the same as being able to show it was issued. The second question is the one that gets asked, and the answer is usually a shrug.
- The signed contract or written statement of terms, in its current version, including every variation since.
- The job description the person was actually working to, rather than the one used to advertise the role.
- The policy or rule said to have been breached, in the version in force on the date concerned.
- Evidence that the policy reached the person — an acknowledgement, an induction record, a system log, anything dated.
The fourth is where most files fail. A handbook on an intranet nobody has opened since onboarding is not obviously the same thing as a rule the person agreed to follow, and an organisation that cannot show when a version changed cannot show which version applied.
What this actually is
Dismissal, redundancy, the end of a fixed term, a resignation that is really a dismissal, the ending of a contract with somebody who was never an employee at all — these are different animals with different requirements, and they get muddled because the organisational conversation about all of them sounds the same.
The label matters because it decides which process applies, what has to be consulted on, what is owed and what evidence will be wanted. Picking it late, or picking one and then arguing for another, is a recognisable and expensive mistake.
Write the answer down and date it. If two people in the room would describe the situation differently, that disagreement is the most useful information anyone has, and it will not survive to the hearing unless it is recorded.
Who decides, and who must not
The person who investigates should not be the person who decides, and neither of them should be the person who hears an appeal. In a small organisation that is genuinely hard, and the usual outcome is one manager performing all three roles and the file reading as though the conclusion was reached on day one.
Where separation is impossible it should be named, in writing, before the process starts, together with whatever was done instead — an external adviser, a non-executive, a manager from another site. A documented constraint is defensible in a way that an undocumented one is not.
Set out, before the first meeting, who is investigating, who will decide, and who will hear any appeal. Where the same person has to do more than one of these, record why, and record what was done to compensate.
What "written down" has to mean
A note that says "performance discussed" records that a meeting happened and nothing else. It cannot support anything, and produced in evidence it tends to be read as confirmation that nothing specific was ever put to the person.
Useful records are boringly concrete: the date, who was present, what specifically was said to be wrong, what was asked for instead, by when, and what happens next. That is five lines, not a report, and the test is whether a stranger reading it in two years could tell what the person was asked to do differently.
The timing problem
The file has to be assembled before the first meeting is arranged, not between the meeting and the hearing. Documents gathered after a person has been told are documents gathered in the knowledge of what they are for, and anyone reading the metadata can see it.
There is also a practical reason. Assembling the file is often how an organisation discovers that the case is weaker than it thought, that the policy says something other than what everyone assumed, or that the last appraisal rated the person as meeting expectations. Finding that out before a conversation is cheap; finding it out afterwards is not.
When none of it exists
Sometimes the honest answer is that there is no contemporaneous note, no issued policy and no evidence of anything. Pretending otherwise is worse than admitting it, because the gaps will be found and the attempt to cover them will become the story.
The usable response is to record the gap, take advice about what can be done from where you now stand, and start the clock properly from today — including, where the situation allows it, by raising the concern formally now rather than treating months of silence as though it had been a process. What happens next is a question for somebody qualified in the place concerned, and they will ask for exactly the documents listed above.