The HR meeting: what to say, what to write down, what to ask for afterwards
HR is not your enemy and not your advocate. The meeting produces a record, and unless you make one too, theirs is the only version that survives.
HR
Every post filed under HR, newest first. Posts can carry several topics, so they show up on more than one of these pages.
The handbook sections worth reading: hours, expenses, discipline, leave
Nobody reads a handbook on the day it matters. Four sections decide real money and real risk, and each one takes about five minutes.
A colleague who will not stop: the paper trail, step by step
Most records of a difficult colleague are long, written from memory, and useless. A usable one is short, dated, boring, and written the same day.
A performance improvement plan, annotated
A PIP is a dated record before it is a development tool. The objectives are usually the vaguest part of it, and that is the part you can change.
The written warning, annotated, and the response you can attach
A warning is not mainly about the incident. It is the first page of a file built to be read later by someone judging whether a future dismissal was fair.
A severance agreement, annotated: what you are being asked to sign away
The number is the part everyone reads. The clauses that outlast the payment are the ones with no number in them at all.
Speaking up about something unsafe, and what to write down
What decides how a hazard gets handled is rarely how bad it is. It is whether a dated written record exists, and who got told in what order.