Treating People Like Human Beings: Handling Exits and PIPS with Empathy

Every single article I've read over the last week talks about "the new normal". How will COVID-19 impact office work? Travel? Work travel? Telecommuting? How will Marketing be handled? Sales? Communication? How will business function in a post-pandemic world? Pre-vaccine? Post vaccine?

With COVID-19 impacting every way to do business, I would urge that HR use this time to reflect on and potentially eliminate one of it's most archaic practices: The Performance Improvement Plan and (in the US) the performance termination.

Like many of my HR peers, I was "raised" with the SHRM (Society of HR Management) version of Human Resources as it related to handling poor performance.

It was the idea of "progressive discipline" (verbal warning > written warning > final warning > termination) and that when you had to exit an employee it was either because you had done the full progressive discipline cycle and you had ample documentation to support the termination or the employee had committed "gross misconduct" (theft, sexual harassment, violence, etc) to such a level that no real documentation was needed. If you didn't have the documentation, you sent it back to the manager and said no termination could be done until there was more documentation, highlighting specific feedback given. At the best of times, it was a paperwork slog and nobody enjoyed it. Managers would have to go back 2-3 times at least, checking for old emails, old texts, old conversations in order to meet the standard necessary for compliance. This took HOURS if not full DAYS.

I was about 5 years into my career, when I first realized how...well...badly this model worked.

It seemed like it was far more of a legal protection than doing what was right for the employee or the employer brand.

The Old Way - A Living Example

I remember it started with an employee who was just given a 30-Day Performance Improvement Plan. I remember she called me in tears after her manager had delivered it stony-faced and asked immediately if I could meet. She came over and we talked in a private office. She was on the sales team for more than 2 years and it was she who planted the first idea in my head that this was NOT the right way to do things.

I gave her what I now realize were empty assurances, telling her she should just focus on improving her behavior and successfully navigating the PIP and I remember her bitter laugh and saying: "Come on Daniel, nobody ever succeeds in these things. It's just a 30 Day termination notice, with a weekly check-in to remind me that I suck."

Sure enough, on the 30th day, I spoke to her manager and she didn't hit her quarterly target. I sat in on the termination meeting and she was angry. She accepted everything we said with a wry smile and stormed out the door without looking back. I helped the manager craft the "exit email" bullet points and had to coach her three different times when different employees brought up the termination, or were caught talking about "who was next" in the rumor mill.

My manager said we did the right thing.

Her manager said we did the right thing.

Legal said the same.

But it didn't feel like we did the right thing.

About a month or so after, she called me to get some information on COBRA. I took the chance and asked her how she was doing, I invited her to share everything with me. The good, bad and ugly. To my surprise, she was very receptive to it and told me her version of how this looked, from an employee standpoint.

She admitted and acknowledged that it had been time for her to move on. She willingly admitted that she had been missing a few of her targets but it wasn't the termination decision that she questioned, it was just the approach that left her so angry.

She explained how being on a Performance Improvement Plan was humiliating. That she had to sign her name to this document calling out all of her negative behaviors like she was a child at school who had gotten in trouble. That on top of that, the PIP itself was a waste of time. There was no way she was going to reach her target and that the weekly 1:1 with her manager was just awkward and painful. She said she was in a much better state of mind and had just finished 2 final rounds at places that she was really excited by. It wasn't the action that she was so upset by, it was how belittling the entire experience was.

I kept thinking about the conversation, and started to think about different approaches. I spoke to managers and employees both. The answer was universal. PIPs or Performance Plans were just painful and horrible for everyone involved. It was humiliating for employees, it was horrible for managers, it was bad for morale, and had a ridiculously low success rate. Terminations were just as bad. As I started learning that the rest of the world gave severance payments even in the case of gross misconduct, because they had a basic "treat people like human beings" mentality, where as some of the companies I worked, unless it was a layoff, you were usually given nothing beyond a 2 week notice period here in the USA, and that even if you were laid off in a small company, you were likely to receive *nothing*.

I brought this up to my managers and leaders, but the answer was somewhat of a mix of "well, this is how we've done it" to "we need this for legal compliance". It was around that time I realized it was also time for me to leave.

Treating People like People: A New Approach

At my next company, with a fresh start and a fresh client group, I took the chance of trying something new, and about 6 months in when a VP came up to me to talk about a low performer on her team, (let's call him "Tim") I could tell the VP (let's call her Anne) was used to the "progressive discipline" approach.

Anne told me she hadn't really given Tim anything concrete beyond one or two verbal coaching conversations, she just knew this wasn't the right fit. Tim was clearly not happy, he had given 2 presentations with pretty big errors in them, he had been late 3 times over the last 2 weeks with no call or text and when the Anne had asked him for a follow up on an urgent matter, Tim completely forgot about it.

Anne was exhausted. The low performer on her team meant that the other teammates had to pick-up the slack. She was tired of balancing everything and didn't know what to do to get Tim to suddenly turn things around. Anne confided that she wouldn't have hired Tim, but instead he was part of a team she inherited and he'd been reporting to her for almost a year.

The "formal policy" would've been to give Tim a written warning, and after another 30 days, a formal 2-3 month performance plan. Anne knew this and neither of us had any desire to do it. So I suggested another option: "Have you spoken to Tim frankly?"

When asked what I meant by that, I just laid out the situation. Had she spoken to Tim, as a human being, to ask if he was happy, if he wanted to succeed? Did Tim think he was doing a good job? I remember the look on the Anne's face was priceless, followed by an almost startled: "Can I do that? Can I just have a conversation with him without it being a disciplinary action?"

Anne and I crafted the speaking points, and we could both feel a more productive energy in the air. This wasn't about legal documentation, this was about just having a human conversation. I helped outline the bigger points, and told Anne the one phrase she needed to make sure she said: "Tim, your employment is at risk".

They met for lunch later that week and Anne sent me a note saying it had gone really well. Tim was going to take the weekend to think about it. Tim ended up reaching out to me and we had what I thought was a really productive conversation. This wasn't about beating him down. He agreed with the feedback, he was just really scared. He didn't want to admit that he was failing, he asked if he could speak with myself and Anne together.

After 20 minutes, we had reached a really good amicable agreement.

Tim would resign.

Provided he didn't speak negatively of Anne or the employer, he could own all of the communication around his resignation. Anne would be open to giving Tim time off to interview provided it didn't become too difficult, and Tim in turn would commit to helping all of the transition work.

After a few days of uneasy "will the other side keep their bargain?" it turned into the best possible solution all around. Once Tim announced his resignation, the miasma of negativity came to a halt around him and his co-workers began planning him a goodbye party.

This is one of the biggest elements to why progressive discipline doesn't work. When a company does a termination on an unsuspecting employee, they lose all of their dignity. For anyone who has ever been in that situation, the idea of gathering all of your things at your desk while your manager looks on? Or that you were in the middle of a bunch of projects and then one day vanish? And then you get the barrage of questions from both your well meaning former co-workers as well as the nosey ones? Doing it this way avoided all of that. Tim got to keep his dignity, and in exchange, his co-workers took his announcement at face value keeping the communication and churn down to almost nothing.

When Tim saw Anne keep her side of the bargain, he kept his. He had originally asked for 8 weeks of notice period, but we countered with 6, and he accepted. He took a few days of "PTO" that Anne knew were for interviews, and almost shockingly, when Tim mentioned to Anne a company that he was interviewing with, she herself had worked there for 10 years and was able to give him some tips and tricks for the interview. When not interviewing, Tim was present and performing. He was no longer suffering from imposter syndrome and no longer had to pretend. He was now more concerned with his legacy and he spent a few late nights and weekends putting together all of the transition work so that nothing fell between the cracks

Tim's last day came and his co-workers took him out to lunch, and then had a good-bye party for him with cake and beer. I stopped by to wish him luck and he pulled me and Anne aside and thanked us. That the way he had been treated during this was remarkable. He didn't have a formal offer yet, but was up to a last round for one place and was confident he would land a place soon, but even having the almost 2 months notice had given him enough time to digest and prepare his finances accordingly. He landed an incredible job making 30% more about a month later. He even shared that while interviewing, he felt "good" talking about his experiences with us and this company and that had he been "fired", he would've been negative.

This then, became my model for performance terminations after that and in my 10 or so years of doing it, I'd say I've seen it succeed almost 90% of the time. I always ensured that the manager had done their due diligence, of providing the right platform, giving the employee all the tools to succeed, and if so, that before entering termination territory, I would coach them to have the 'human conversation', because it was a win/win. And best of all, it touched on and thrived on one of my favorite things. Empathy.

The employee benefits by keeping their dignity, being treated like a human being and can own the message so relationships were much better, the manager benefits from having the employee actively help with the transition, and the company benefits by not having so much churn on preparing paperwork, looking over documentation, preparing for hidden termination meetings in secret, and behind the scenes conversations with IT/security, and then prepping communications for the manager to reduce churn.

I've adopted this model in almost every company I've worked with, to some really incredible results. I hope that all of these forced changes and updates to how we work, that HR can use this opportunity to look at how it can reduce, if not altogether remove, the performance discipline and performance termination process and be the forefront of putting the HUMAN back into Human Resources.