Write-Ups Provide Stronger Legal Protection When They Include Training And Clear Expectations
If you're writing it down for the exercise of documenting it and not providing the tools to the employee, you're just doing an exercise to get them out the door.
Laura Van Winkle
SVP of HR
Adobe Population Health
A corrective action is often written with a lawsuit in mind. The file proves the company gave warning, and employees read it exactly that way. What comes out is a record of everything someone did wrong and nothing about how to fix it. A write-up that also lists the training the employee will get protects the company just as well, and the employee walks away with something to do.
Laura Van Winkle is Senior Vice President of Human Resources at Adobe Population Health, a Phoenix-based care management company that coordinates in-home and virtual care for high-risk patients across the Southwest. She has spent more than two decades in healthcare HR after earlier work in manufacturing and financial services, and she holds a Master of Jurisprudence in Labor and Employment Law from Tulane University. The legal exposure is the part of a corrective action she knows best, which is why she pushes managers past it.
“If you’re writing it down for the exercise of documenting it and not providing the tools to the employee, you’re just doing an exercise to get them out the door,” says Van Winkle. A warm delivery doesn’t fix a write-up with nothing in it. The employee still leaves the meeting holding a problem and no way to solve it.
A write-up needs a deadline and an owner
Van Winkle handles two kinds of corrective action differently. A policy violation goes in the file because it may come up again later. The correction is simple. Don’t do it again.
A performance problem takes more work. The write-up says what the job requires. It says where the work is falling short. It gives the employee a deadline, usually 30, 60, or 90 days, and it says what they get to help them meet it. That last part is almost always extra training, which she describes as the easy piece. Companies with solid written procedures and nothing behind them end up with files that only build a case. “Performance management or corrective action is an exercise in documenting the gaps between expectations and what’s actually being completed. It really should not be punitive,” she says.
All of that falls apart when the manager doesn’t stand behind it. Managers sometimes open by saying HR made them do this. That one sentence undoes the page. It tells the employee their manager doesn’t agree with what’s written there, and it points them at a department that never sees them work.
Van Winkle hands the job back to the manager. They watch the performance every day, so they own the write-up and the meeting that comes with it. A manager doing this says what the missed work cost the team, says the record is there so it doesn’t happen again, and offers the training in the same sitting. It’s the stronger legal position, too. A manager who watched the work can describe it, while anyone writing the file afterward is working from memory, and that’s where documented warnings come apart. “You are the manager. You need to manage their performance. Take responsibility for ensuring that your employee succeeds,” she adds.
Trust gets built long before the meeting
Ownership only goes so far if the employee has already decided what the meeting is. Most people assume an HR presence in the room means a firing, and Van Winkle works against that on purpose. She sits in when a manager expects the conversation to get heated, then says almost nothing. Her job is to answer questions and to step in only if the manager says something they shouldn’t. The manager gets backup, and the employee gets someone in the room who isn’t their boss. “I tell the manager I’m a fly on the wall. I may correct you if you say something you shouldn’t, but they are driving that conversation,” she notes.
Doing that often enough changes what people assume when she walks in, and it pays off later. Employees who think HR only shows up for firings won’t flag a problem while it’s still small. The same goes for managers who save everything for the annual review. Raising something from January in a December meeting leaves the employee no chance to have fixed it, and it leaves the manager reading out a list nobody saw coming after a year in which silence looked like a good sign.
Companies that hold feedback for one annual review can lose people over it, and small companies have the least room to absorb that. BambooHR’s 2026 Employee Happiness Report found that among organizations with 150 or fewer employees, the ones with negative eNPS scores lose 18 to 19 percentage points more of their workforce each year than the happiest ones. At a 75-person company, that’s roughly 14 extra departures a year. The report notes the link runs in both directions and stops short of proving cause. It also puts employees at the two to three year mark at the bottom of the satisfaction curve, below new hires and below long-tenured staff.
Van Winkle’s floor is a monthly one-on-one. The hour belongs to the employee. She keeps it informal so it doesn’t turn into a coaching session, and she asks her own reports what they need from her and what gave them the most trouble that month. Employees who use part of that time to log their wins walk into promotion conversations with the record already built. “The sooner you address something, the more trust it builds with the employee. The manager has trust that the employee is doing what they should be doing, and the employee feels comfortable going to the manager with questions,” she says.
Write it down while it’s fresh
Van Winkle works from a plain rule. If it isn’t written down, it didn’t happen. For an HR team of one, that means a short email to herself after any conversation worth remembering, sent while the details are still clear.
She sends a second version to the manager. It lays out what was discussed and what happens next, and it asks the manager to correct anything she misheard. That email catches the cases where two people leave the same meeting with different accounts of it. Employees tend to stop listening the moment they hear criticism, so whatever help gets offered later in a conversation often never registers. “You can tell an employee the sky is blue, and they go back to their desk and say, well, she told me the sky is purple,” she notes.
Same-day notes matter for a second reason, and this is where her law degree shows. Managers who keep running notes sometimes write them all at once, after a situation has already gone bad. Personnel records carry a timestamp. An attorney can open the metadata on a document and read the creation date, and so can she. Months of history typed up in a single hour is documentation she would question herself.
“I don’t think you can document too much, but you also don’t want to look like you’re documenting for a trial. If you’re going to document it, document it for real, not for pretend,” she says.
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TL;DR
Laura Van Winkle
Adobe Population Health
SVP of HR
SVP of HR
A corrective action is often written with a lawsuit in mind. The file proves the company gave warning, and employees read it exactly that way. What comes out is a record of everything someone did wrong and nothing about how to fix it. A write-up that also lists the training the employee will get protects the company just as well, and the employee walks away with something to do.
Laura Van Winkle is Senior Vice President of Human Resources at Adobe Population Health, a Phoenix-based care management company that coordinates in-home and virtual care for high-risk patients across the Southwest. She has spent more than two decades in healthcare HR after earlier work in manufacturing and financial services, and she holds a Master of Jurisprudence in Labor and Employment Law from Tulane University. The legal exposure is the part of a corrective action she knows best, which is why she pushes managers past it.
“If you’re writing it down for the exercise of documenting it and not providing the tools to the employee, you’re just doing an exercise to get them out the door,” says Van Winkle. A warm delivery doesn’t fix a write-up with nothing in it. The employee still leaves the meeting holding a problem and no way to solve it.
A write-up needs a deadline and an owner
Van Winkle handles two kinds of corrective action differently. A policy violation goes in the file because it may come up again later. The correction is simple. Don’t do it again.
A performance problem takes more work. The write-up says what the job requires. It says where the work is falling short. It gives the employee a deadline, usually 30, 60, or 90 days, and it says what they get to help them meet it. That last part is almost always extra training, which she describes as the easy piece. Companies with solid written procedures and nothing behind them end up with files that only build a case. “Performance management or corrective action is an exercise in documenting the gaps between expectations and what’s actually being completed. It really should not be punitive,” she says.
All of that falls apart when the manager doesn’t stand behind it. Managers sometimes open by saying HR made them do this. That one sentence undoes the page. It tells the employee their manager doesn’t agree with what’s written there, and it points them at a department that never sees them work.
Van Winkle hands the job back to the manager. They watch the performance every day, so they own the write-up and the meeting that comes with it. A manager doing this says what the missed work cost the team, says the record is there so it doesn’t happen again, and offers the training in the same sitting. It’s the stronger legal position, too. A manager who watched the work can describe it, while anyone writing the file afterward is working from memory, and that’s where documented warnings come apart. “You are the manager. You need to manage their performance. Take responsibility for ensuring that your employee succeeds,” she adds.
Trust gets built long before the meeting
Ownership only goes so far if the employee has already decided what the meeting is. Most people assume an HR presence in the room means a firing, and Van Winkle works against that on purpose. She sits in when a manager expects the conversation to get heated, then says almost nothing. Her job is to answer questions and to step in only if the manager says something they shouldn’t. The manager gets backup, and the employee gets someone in the room who isn’t their boss. “I tell the manager I’m a fly on the wall. I may correct you if you say something you shouldn’t, but they are driving that conversation,” she notes.
Doing that often enough changes what people assume when she walks in, and it pays off later. Employees who think HR only shows up for firings won’t flag a problem while it’s still small. The same goes for managers who save everything for the annual review. Raising something from January in a December meeting leaves the employee no chance to have fixed it, and it leaves the manager reading out a list nobody saw coming after a year in which silence looked like a good sign.
Companies that hold feedback for one annual review can lose people over it, and small companies have the least room to absorb that. BambooHR’s 2026 Employee Happiness Report found that among organizations with 150 or fewer employees, the ones with negative eNPS scores lose 18 to 19 percentage points more of their workforce each year than the happiest ones. At a 75-person company, that’s roughly 14 extra departures a year. The report notes the link runs in both directions and stops short of proving cause. It also puts employees at the two to three year mark at the bottom of the satisfaction curve, below new hires and below long-tenured staff.
Van Winkle’s floor is a monthly one-on-one. The hour belongs to the employee. She keeps it informal so it doesn’t turn into a coaching session, and she asks her own reports what they need from her and what gave them the most trouble that month. Employees who use part of that time to log their wins walk into promotion conversations with the record already built. “The sooner you address something, the more trust it builds with the employee. The manager has trust that the employee is doing what they should be doing, and the employee feels comfortable going to the manager with questions,” she says.
Write it down while it’s fresh
Van Winkle works from a plain rule. If it isn’t written down, it didn’t happen. For an HR team of one, that means a short email to herself after any conversation worth remembering, sent while the details are still clear.
She sends a second version to the manager. It lays out what was discussed and what happens next, and it asks the manager to correct anything she misheard. That email catches the cases where two people leave the same meeting with different accounts of it. Employees tend to stop listening the moment they hear criticism, so whatever help gets offered later in a conversation often never registers. “You can tell an employee the sky is blue, and they go back to their desk and say, well, she told me the sky is purple,” she notes.
Same-day notes matter for a second reason, and this is where her law degree shows. Managers who keep running notes sometimes write them all at once, after a situation has already gone bad. Personnel records carry a timestamp. An attorney can open the metadata on a document and read the creation date, and so can she. Months of history typed up in a single hour is documentation she would question herself.
“I don’t think you can document too much, but you also don’t want to look like you’re documenting for a trial. If you’re going to document it, document it for real, not for pretend,” she says.