Counseling Packets to Mentor Your Employees

The last two posts covered how to improve employee performance using counseling and how to deal with problem employees. Both of these posts discussed counseling your employees. This post will cover the benefits of maintaining a counseling packet on each employee as well as what specifically goes into counseling packets.

Purpose

The purpose in keeping a counseling packet is to have a written record of what your employees have achieved, what they should be focused on, and what they want to do in the future. A counseling packet gives you a place to consolidate written records of your employees’ counseling sessions, which outline performance. You can also maintain other pertinent data, which gives you a more holistic picture of your employee all in one place.

Benefits

Maintaining a counseling packet offers you several benefits:

• Determine Whether Goals were Achieved. The packet gives you the ability to see whether your employee has met goals identified for the quarter.
• Identify Trends. It also allows you to look back at quarterly performance counseling sessions to see trends over time.
• Evaluations Made Easier. Counseling packets also make writing annual evaluations much simpler as you have a written record of the employee’s performance over the year. Counseling packets make it easier and more accurate to write annual evaluations. They allow you to use quarterly counseling sessions as a guide to writing the evaluation. This is much easier than trying to remember what your employee has accomplished over the last year.

Components of Counseling Packets 

I typically use a 6-sided folder for maintaining various documents in the employee’s counseling packet. Each side of the folder constitutes the sections outlined below:

Personal info sheet

This includes information on their family members, degrees held, and other special skills, like foreign languages, that are unique to this employee.

Employee Snapshot

This section can include the employee’s Resume, Curriculum Vitae (CV), or Record Brief (ERB/ORB) depending on your profession. The purpose of this is to keep in mind the employee’s previous experience, certifications, and publications. Though these other experiences and certifications may not be pertinent to the employee’s current position, it helps to understand your employee in a more holistic manner. This can help you identify the best employee for a specific project or help you guide them into positions beyond

Counseling Statements

I keep the employee’s counseling sessions in one section in reverse chronological order. The initial counseling that lays out roles, responsibilities and expectations are located at the bottom. A record of each subsequent counseling session is placed on top of the previous session. This applies to both, performance and event counseling.

Evaluations 

Copies of the employee’s previous evaluations (that I have given) are maintained in the next session. I also keep a working copy of the employee’s next evaluation on top of this section. This is where I will pencil in achievements that are not captured in quarterly counseling sessions.

Developmental Action Plan

This is a document in which the employee outlines professional, personal, and financial goals over the next five years. This document is more for the employee than it is for the supervisor. This is especially helpful for young employees as a way to identify goals over time and forces them to be intentional about setting goals and taking an active role in managing their own careers.

Career Timeline (Military)

In most military specialties, there are certain milestones in one’s career. As a result, most branches of the military have a sample career timeline, which can help identify future opportunities to take key, developmental, or broadening assignments. Understanding one’s career timeline allows your employee to backward plan their career based on where they want to be at the pinnacle of their career.

Conclusion

Maintaining a counseling packet on your employees, not only helps you to organize information and write annual evaluations, but more importantly, the packet helps you understand your employees’ experiences, goals, and desires. Understanding your employees at a deeper level enables you to guide them to opportunities in their career. Using this technique can help you to develop long-term mentoring relationships with your employees.

Question: What method have you found effective in coaching or mentoring your employees?