(From Business Management Daily)--When preparing to terminate a worker, you want to be able to produce the most solid documentation to defend a potential lawsuit. Just make sure supervisors know to document employee performance and behavior at the time it occurs—not just before or after the employee leaves the building.

Unless you have a consistent, pre-existing paper trail showing poor performance _before_the complaint, going back to create one (or hastily creating one before a termination) is legally dangerous.

Recent case: A North Carolina trucking company fired one if its drivers for allegedly refusing to work for four weeks after complaining about racial harassment.

The driver, who is black, said he heard daily racist taunts. Managers and employees frequently used the N-word, plus terms like “lawn jockey,” “coon” and “tar baby” when referring to blacks. Nooses were often seen hanging from rafters.

The employee says he was fired soon after he failed to complete a delivery. The employee said he was sick, but the company argued that he never told anyone about the illness. It said he was terminated for this and other allegedly poor work.

The EEOC, however, offered testimony from other employees. One claimed that she had been told, after the fact, to create paper records showing “a pattern of laziness” about the employee. When the court looked at those records, it found that the discipline didn’t match up with other payroll and attendance records, making them highly suspect.

The EEOC also pointed out that white employees apparently got frequent second chances that black employees did not. 

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