Performance Improvement Plan- The Goal is improvement!

As an HR Business Partner, the scenario is quite familiar when the business leaders and managers want help in drawing a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) for an employee who is not performing. As a facilitator of the process, it is important to have insights to who, what, how, how many times of the issue and to keep the employee informed and sensitized on the outcome of the PIP. The common questions to business leaders and business managers are:

• Is the employee aware he/she is not performing?
• Are the expectations from the role and goals defined and documented?
• Has there been a written feedback shared with the employee?
• Has the employee even completed probation?

In most of the cases, it turns out that the documentation is minimal and the feedbacks have been informal. For example, if it is noticed by the manager that an employee is often late to work, the manager should take it up with the employee mentioning that late coming is unacceptable. Written documentation of the late comings and of the conversation with the employee is crucial.

The attached presentation has a step by step guide on how to manage Performance issues of the employees. This may turn out to be helpful for business leaders and managers.

The saying that performance improvement plans (PIPs) are only ever used as a way to push employees out, is absolutely, 100% not universal. It is actually the last attempt to see if the employee can improve to the level needed to remain in the job by laying out very clear expectations so that there’s no miscommunication about what needs to change/ improve, functionally or behaviorally and so that the employee understands the seriousness of the situation and understands closure of the process may result in serious outcome.

The idea truly is to give fair chance to the employees to make them understand the expectations and enable them to deliver. Have witnessed cases when employees were able to survive the Performance Improvement plans and doing decently well in their roles now. Hope this step by step guide helps in making the entire process fair, transparent and in the interest of the organizations.